I receive quite a few emails from people asking me to buy their domain names or for some help selling their domain names. If I am not interested in buying the name(s), I will generally politely decline and may point them in the direction of marketplaces like Sedo or Afternic. Unfortunately, some domain names are simply not sellable.

You probably wouldn’t believe the quality of the vast majority of domain names that are sent to me. Many don’t make any sense to me, have hyphens in strange locations, use obscure words in non .com extensions, randomly replace letters with numbers, or they have other features that make them pretty worthless from my perspective. I feel badly when I see these emails, especially when someone sends an email with a huge list of names that are of the same quality.

Buying domain names that aren’t worth anything can be

A good friend of mine dabbles in domain names. I say “dabbles” because he probably owns 10 domain names as investments and all of them were hand registered. My friend occasionally asks me about domain names for various ideas he has, and he  usually sends an email to inquire about domain names he likes.

My friend  faces a bit of trouble when inquiring about domain names. He is in the finance / banking / investment /venture industry. My bet is that domain owners who receive his inquiries do a Google search, see his background, and incorrectly assume that their domain name is the target of something major. Under this assumption, they give him ridiculous prices for their domain names.

Although my friend inquires about