Domain inactive

[fonzi]

Hi, a friend of mine has a problem. She did an IT course a few years ago and on it they set up an email address for all the participants under the domain of the course provider (i.e. joebloggs@webdev.com). The addresses were set up in gmail but using the domain of the course provider (i.e. the email address was not "@gmail") but to log int to the account you had to go to gmail.com to log in.
However the domain is now dormant as the company have not renewed it or have let the renewal lapse. Now she can't receive any mail under that address. She gets the message "your message wasn't delivered the domain can't be found".
I have read that if she buys the domain and the MX records have not changed, she will be able to send and receive from that email account again?
Is this correct?

 

[mneylon]

If the domain name has completely lapsed and is available for registration then she'd be able to register it.
However the MX records and all the other DNS records would be gone.
You could probably find out what they were, but if it's a domain that's being used with G Suite then it would need to be setup again either there or somewhere else.
So basically they could do the following:

• register the domain name
• setup email with a provider - any provider really

Of course any emails sent to the old email address in the past won't be waiting anywhere - they're gone.

Does that make sense?

Michele

 

[fonzi]

If the domain name has completely lapsed and is available for registration then she'd be able to register it.
However the MX records and all the other DNS records would be gone.
You could probably find out what they were, but if it's a domain that's being used with G Suite then it would need to be setup again either there or somewhere else.
So basically they could do the following:

• register the domain name
• setup email with a provider - any provider really

Of course any emails sent to the old email address in the past won't be waiting anywhere - they're gone.

Does that make sense?

Michele

Thanks for the reply. I suppose she would be happy just to get the email address functioning again but it would be great if she could get any emails sent to her address since the domain became inactive (that is about two weeks ago at this stage). Is it possible to find out the DNS and MX records that were there when the domain was active?

 

[mneylon]

Emails sent while the domain was effectively "dead" are probably gone.
Most mail servers will try to send an email but if they get a "not found" result they're not going to retry more than once or twice (depending on configuration)
So I'd be very surprised if any emails sent over the last few weeks are "waiting" anywhere
Also if the domain has only expired in the last couple of weeks it might not be fully released back into the pool yet.

Legacy DNS records - there are some services that keep track of nameservers etc., so you *might* be able to find them, but they won't help if the domain was using G suite, as she wouldn't have access to that account.