Cancelling, recovering and released names

Module 5: Renewing, expiring and cancelling · Reading time: 9 minutes

Learning objective: After this lesson you can cancel a domain carefully, recover an expired or cancelled domain, and explain why a released name can be a risk.

Key concepts: cancelling with your registrar, withdrawing a cancellation, quarantine, restore, dropcatching, backorder, leftover mail, password reset, keeping a domain

You cancel with your registrar

You always cancel a domain with the registrar where it is registered, not with the registry. The registrar then passes the cancellation on. How this works differs per registrar. Many registrars let you choose:

• Cancel at the end date. The domain keeps working until the end of the current period and is not renewed after that.
• Delete immediately. The registrar cancels the name at the registry straight away. From that moment the quarantine or restore period starts (lesson 5.2), and your website and email stop working.

As long as the end date has not been reached, you can usually withdraw a cancellation. Once the name has been deleted at the registry, it is no longer that simple: you then have to recover it from the quarantine or restore period.

Watch out for who is allowed to cancel. Only the registrant can have a name taken out of quarantine, transferred or put in the name of another registrant. If your domain is registered in the name of your web designer (lesson 3.2), you have no say at this stage.

Before you cancel: what still depends on this name?

A domain you "no longer use" is often still in use. Just not in a way you can see. So before cancelling, go through these questions:

1. Is email still coming in on addresses on this name? Old customers, suppliers and newsletters sometimes keep sending to an old address for years.
2. Is an email address on this name linked to accounts? Think of your bank, your accounting software, social media, your registrar itself or the tax authority. With many services you reset a password through an email to that address.
3. Are there still links to the name, on other websites, in old leaflets, on business cards or on your van?
4. Is the name a variant of your brand that you once registered to prevent misuse (lesson 7.2)?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, keeping the domain is often wiser than cancelling it. For example, set up a redirect to your new name and keep the email running for a while.

The risk of a released name

After the quarantine or restore period, anyone can register the name. And that often happens faster than you think.

Some parties watch names that are about to be released and try to register them the moment they become available. This is called dropcatching. You can also ask such a party to try to register a name for you as soon as it becomes available: a backorder. This is not a guarantee: valuable names that are being released are often targeted by several parties at once.

For the previous registrant, the main risk is leftover mail. Whoever registers your old name can set up a mailbox and will then receive all the email still being sent to your old addresses: quotes, invoices, personal messages. Worse: with a "forgot password" email, they can try to log in to accounts still linked to that address. That is why SIDN warns previous registrants when a cancelled .nl name is still receiving a lot of email.

Your visitors are at risk too. An old name with many links pointing to it can, once registered by someone else, show a fake shop, advertising or something worse, while people think it still belongs to you.

Example: Example Bakery chooses a new name

Example Bakery in Bristol used to be called Wright's Bakery and used the name wrightsbakery.example for years. Since last year everything runs on example.com. The old name seems unnecessary. Yet a check shows:

• email still arrives every week on the old info address, from a regular supplier and from two business customers;
• the accounts with the bank and the till system still use an address on the old name;
• the old name is still on the delivery lorry.

The bakery decides to keep the name for at least a few more years, with a redirect to example.com. First, all accounts are switched to an address on example.com. Only when no email has arrived on the old name for a long time will they decide again.

Recovering: what you need to do

If a name has been cancelled or has expired by mistake after all, act quickly:

1. Check which phase the name is in. Use the registry's Whois or RDAP, or a WHOIS tool (lessons 4.1 and 4.3). If it says "In quarantine" (.nl), redemptionPeriod (.com) or something similar, you can still recover it. If it says pendingDelete, it is too late.
2. Contact your registrar. Ask whether they can restore the name or take it out of quarantine. For .nl, .de, .eu and .be this can also be done through a new registrar, if the old one will not help or no longer exists.
3. Make sure you can prove that you are the registrant. Only the previous registrant can recover the name.
4. Then check everything. Are the nameservers, the website and the email working again? Is automatic renewal switched on (lesson 5.1)?

If the name has already been released and registered by someone else, you can no longer recover it. You can approach the new registrant or, if it concerns your brand, look at the dispute procedures in lesson 7.2.

In practice: how it works at WebOké

On the domain page in My WebOké, the Advanced card has the button Cancel domain. The domain then stays active until the end date, and with Undo cancellation you reverse it. For .nl you can also choose to delete immediately: this is followed by 40 days of quarantine in which only you can have the name recovered. If you do not want to cancel the name but give it to someone else, choose Transfer to another customer (lesson 6.4). Other registrars work in a similar way.

Summary

• You cancel with your registrar, at the end date or immediately; as long as the name has not been deleted, you can usually withdraw a cancellation.
• Before cancelling, check whether email, accounts or links still depend on the name.
• A released name can be registered by someone else straight away (dropcatching), who then receives your leftover mail.
• Only the previous registrant can recover a name, through the old or a new registrar, as long as the name is not in pending delete or released.

Quiz

Exercise

Exercise A5.3: Cancel, keep or transfer? (case study). Read the four situations and choose the wisest option for each one.

1. A company switched to a new name last year. Email still arrives every week on the old info address, and the bank account still uses an address on the old name.
2. Two years ago someone registered a name for a promotion that never went ahead. No website or email address has ever been used on it, and there are no links to it anywhere.
3. An association uses its name every day for its website and email and wants to keep it. The registrar where the name is registered does not offer two-factor authentication. Its other domains are already with a registrar that does.
4. Years ago an online shop registered a typo variant of its name that redirects to the shop. The statistics show visitors arriving through that variant every week.

For each situation, choose from:

• cancel
• keep
• transfer

The program compares your answers with a fixed answer key. If you make a mistake, you get a hint and can try again.

Further reading

• WebOké manual 5.15: Cancelling or transferring a domain
• Recovering an expired or cancelled domain: quarantine and redemption period
• Cancelling products and domains, withdrawing a cancellation, and what happens next
• Mail traffic to cancelled domain names (SIDN): https://www.sidn.nl/en/nl-domain-name/mail-traffic-to-cancelled-domain-names