I received an email from Network Solutions last week to remind me about renewing a domain name. They even offered me a special discount code for renewing this domain name, which I previously won on NameJet:

The only problem with this email is that the domain name was transferred to GoDaddy back in March. A Whois search confirms that the domain name is no longer registered at Network Solutions.

It would appear that the UsedAgain.com record in my Network Solutions account is known as a “ghost record.” This means that it would appear to exist within my Network Solutions account, but it is really at GoDaddy. I would not be able to modify nameservers, set up forwarding, or do anything else with the domain name from within Network Solutions.

The big question I have is whether

Andrew Allemann reported about changes that are coming to domain name transfers, and it is a bit concerning to me. You can read about the new, hopefully temporary transfer authorization process on Domain Name Wire, but this is the part that concerns me:

“In many cases, domain name registrars will not be able to get the registrant email address from Whois that is necessary to send a Form of Authorization when someone transfers a domain name to them. As a result, gaining registrars will be allowed to skip the Form of Authorization requirement.” (emphasis added by me).

From what I understand, domain registrars are responsible for generating EPP authorization codes. Each registrar may have its own process for creating them and for updating them regularly or periodically. With the new transfer process coming into play, I think it is very important for domain registrars to reset all EPP authorization codes. If that would be a major inconvenience for customers who are in the middle of a domain transfer, perhaps the EPP codes could be reset for those that were requested more than 30 days ago.

It would appear that someone could

I use Whois privacy on some of my domain names for competitive reasons. I don’t necessarily want people to know I own or acquired certain domain names, and having privacy enabled is an inexpensive way to keep some registrations private.

Just because I have privacy enabled on domain names, it does not necessarily mean that I am not interested in selling domain names. Although I have found that the majority of people contact me using links on the landing page of these domain names, I am fairly regularly contacted via email found during a Whois lookup.

One issue I have found is that some privacy services