A few months ago, I found a perfect .com domain name for a website I'm working on. Bad news: it was taken. Good news: It was set to expire on January 12, 2012. It's not a premium name or anything special that would make me think other people are waiting for it, so I decided to just wait and see if it expired and then buy it up. The site consisted of just one page with plenty of broken links and images. The information was irrelevant and dated. There is one ad, but it doesn't look like the site is being purposefulness squatted. I figured that the owner was done with it, and would let it expire.However, WHOIS information revealed that the domain was registered via 1&1. Some research reveled that 1&1 has an auto-renew option for domains that's on by default, and quite difficult to disable (I've never used 1&1, so I can't verify if this is true). I started to worry that the current owner (who probably doesn't work in the web development field based on the appearance of the site) had no idea that the domain would automatically renew itself. My fear was realized when the expiration date jumped forward a year right as the domain was set to enter the redemption period. I highly doubt the webmaster would wait that long to renew a domain, especially considering that 1&1 has a $40 fee to renew a domain in the redemption period.So sent an email to the address listed in the WHOIS database asking if the domain was for sale (Exactly a week ago). The address was firstname@lastname.com. If found this odd at first, and suspected that it was not really his address, but I can confirm that he does in fact own lastname.com (another outdated site with little information about anything, and no contact information). The email doesn't sound like some sort of spamtrap that he doesn't actually use, either.Now I'm stuck. I starting to doubt that the owner will respond, and I'm admittedly disappointed that I may have lost such a perfect domain. I'm working on finding other suitable names, but I don't want to give up on this one until I know it's out of reach.So, what else can I do to obtain this domain name?
What can I do to contact a domain owner?
domains;domain registration;whois