Domain registries provide registrars with reports of domains which are set to expire, and if you’re not a registrar yourself, you can often purchase these lists on a secondary market or use APIs built upon serving this information.
But even if you don’t have that list, you can do a Whois search for any domain and know its expiration. You could build your own database!
Note that most domains have a grace period (eg, 30 days) where the original owner can renew even after it has expired. So it’s not like you’d be able to steal someone’s domain just because of a clerical error.
Droplists are from namejet, domain cleaning is done by checking against zone-files from ICANN (that's why I don't currently check .tv and .cc domains as there are no zone-files by ICANN provided for them. As they are country specific, I would have to build custom solutions for them, which I don't want for a proof of concept).
memset|5 years ago
The industry term for this business is called “drop catching” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_drop_catching
Domain registries provide registrars with reports of domains which are set to expire, and if you’re not a registrar yourself, you can often purchase these lists on a secondary market or use APIs built upon serving this information.
But even if you don’t have that list, you can do a Whois search for any domain and know its expiration. You could build your own database!
Note that most domains have a grace period (eg, 30 days) where the original owner can renew even after it has expired. So it’s not like you’d be able to steal someone’s domain just because of a clerical error.
iso947|5 years ago
Back in the day Microsoft dropped the ball with passport.com, shutting down hotmail over Christmas.
https://m.slashdot.org/story/8999
https://www.doublewide.net/faq.html
You’d think Microsoft would have learnt their lesson but no, 3 years later it was Hotmail.co.uk that dropped off
https://www.theregister.com/2003/11/06/microsoft_forgets_to_...
adminu|5 years ago
Droplists are from namejet, domain cleaning is done by checking against zone-files from ICANN (that's why I don't currently check .tv and .cc domains as there are no zone-files by ICANN provided for them. As they are country specific, I would have to build custom solutions for them, which I don't want for a proof of concept).