Yahoo has screwed me over with their domain registration service

Hi,

I know this isn't exactly the right place to fuel this, but I felt that I had to write this somewhere, and this is the only blog I have, so here goes,

I had always been a victim of domain registration. I was a dissatisfied godaddy customer before. It all started from the day when I borrowed a friend's computer to check on my domain settings and paid the domain registration on his computer. I registered some domains because I felt that I wanted to have my name as the domain site. So I never got to the point of building my site, I just paid to get my name reserved. However, in the next year when my renewal fee is due, I was ready to pay for my renewal. I then found out that I don't hold my domains anymore, all the domains are held with my friend's account with godaddy along with his own domains. It was very strange how something like that could happen, maybe the mix and match of cookies within the browser, or the logging of the IP address when you are paying that result in something like that. I called godaddy with both of us on the phone and they said they couldn't transfer back the accounts, it had to be that way. The only way they can do it is to cancel the domains and then register it with my own account. Being a not so happy customer, I jumped ship to yahoo. At the time it was offering $9.95 domain registration, so I jumped even though my year on godaddy still had a few months left. Then I realize it's a good time to register all the family members in my family for their domain names too, they might be worth something later. That was in 2004.


It is now 2006, by now most of you would probably have heard of Google (the provider of this free blog space). And most of us are aware of the new service they provide, Google Applications service. As a domain holder ( or as I thought I was ) I wanted to give it a try, since all my domains are hosted in yahoo, and I don't want to pay an extra dime to get extra email services. Google is offering service so that I can use it with my domain name(free), and they give you free email (with 2 GB) and some free service like calendar, webpage hosting design, etc. I followed all their instruction on how to setup email and www, I changed the C Name record and MX record on server. It was very simple cause Google gave instruction specifically for Yahoo Small Business Domain. I waited a few days then went back to check. It wasn't working, so I checked the MX records, maybe I didn't add the dot at the end of the records which is causing all these confusion. I added it and it says it needs 48 hours to update. So I waited another 2 days. I thought Google should've given better instructions, it's not a very difficult task, how come it's taken me 4 days. Then I checked in today.

And then the bad news strike.

I asked my colleague to check on why it's not working, and he found out that in fact the domain that was registered with Yahoo is in fact not taken. Then I check all my other domains of my family members, some of it shows that they are registered to OTHER people. I thought it might have been an hacker attempt on my domains. However, when I search the domain information, I found them not specifically located to a specific company or country. Some of it seems legit because of my family name SO, only a handful in the world would get it. And seeing some of the address are actually in Hong Kong makes me believe that it might not be of hacker attempt.

I then go onto the Yahoo domain name service to see if my domains are available, they are in fact available. But all this time my account in Yahoo Small Business has been telling me that I own those domains. Even up till now. I paid for the service 2 years ago, and I renewed a few of them last year. They had taken the money from my credit card, and it's a legit transaction. There are a few sites that are still under my name, but that's because these sites are registered within the last year. I simply can't believe how a big company like Yahoo cannot do something as simple as registering domain names, I sincerely hope that this is some kind of hack, otherwise I will probably take some legal action against yahoo. I really do like most of those names cause they are of my family's firstlastname.com. Which is hard to come by. A few of them are already taken and that really sucks. I was thinking of giving the domain names to them as their birthday present or something in the future, plus I've been paying all that money to them, it's not a lot, but still.....

I have captured all the necessary screens and I have sent them an email to "remind" them about my domain. I am waiting for their email right now and thinking of what I will do in the future. Anyone any suggestions? I doubt if I will get it back, cause there are people using those domains already.