I have had two enquiries—though they are by no means the first—from people who want to buy various domains I own. The most common request is for jya.net, which I assume is appealing due to its brevity. (Jya.com was bought by John Young Architect a long time ago and Mr Young and I have had a good discussion about it.) Yesterday, I received one for lucire.com.
   Neither email is detailed:

Hello,

I was wondering if jya.net is available?

Jim

and:

Hi

I was searching for domains and came across your contact details.

I would be interested in purchasing the website lucire.com.

If you are willing to sell then please contact with a price your willing to sell for.

Kind Regards,
Lee

Now, Lee has been more sensible in writing a longer-winded post, but note he doesn’t want to just buy the domain, it’s the entire site.
   You have to wonder.
   For starters: if you guys are domain name dealers, I am not going to negotiate with someone writing me from Gmail or mail.com. (An address with name99@mail.com sounds very dodgy.) It doesn’t elicit much confidence.
   The second question I have to ask is: did you even look at the sites? Do you not realize there are businesses behind them? Businesses with 10 and 20 years’ goodwill?
   I replied to one of these enquiries once (they all read like Jim’s one) and asked what sort of figure I would be turning down. No reply. In fact, I used to reply to a few of them declining their enquiry, but now I am getting more convinced they are spam address harvesters trying to confirm if the address works. (In such a case, the cheeky bastards succeeded.)
   As to Lee, I started off writing a reply, along the lines of: ‘If you buy this, then it comes with several print magazine editions and licensing deals for products. The starting price is …’ and I named a figure closer to my time and monetary investment. I also noted the trade marks involved. I couldn’t finish the email without sounding like an arrogant prick, so I decided to lay off and treat the message as spam, too.
   Lee, if you are reading this, sorry dude, it ain’t for sale. I would seriously recommend you change your approach if you’re legit.

Tags: Lucire, domain names, spam Posted by Jack Yan, 22:13  permalink

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