I received an email today, from a Yahoo! email address, asking if I’d like to purchase the kellysims.com domain. Here is the email below:

Hi,

I own the .COM version of your domain name kellysims.info and I am wanting to sell it.

I was wondering if you would be interested in buying this domain for $95 from me seen as though you own the same domain but in another extension ?

If you are interested please get back to me.

Shawn

I remembered looking into that domain back when I bought up all the kellysims.whatevers that were open and that I wanted. The .com address was taken then. So when I got this email, I was happy. $95 was a bit high though. So first, I decided to do a Whois on the domain, and see if “Shawn” really owned it or not.

For those not in the know on these things, there is a web service called Whois that allows you to pull up ownership details of a domain. Many domains are open for viewing, but many are closed to prying eyes. Using the Whois at Network Solutions revealed it was not actually owned by anyone at all, let alone anyone named “Shawn.”

So I logged into my account at 1and1.com, and bought the domain for a whopping $5.99/year. Within a few hours I had it pointing to my main address, http://anotherbrightidea.org, as I do with all my other kellysims domains.

The moral of the story: Do your homework, and don’t ever, ever, ever trust an email.

Oh, and “Shawn”, thanks buddy. You saved me $89.01 today.