Transfer a Domain Name, Lose Your Associated Email - at least temporarily
Since this just happened to me today, and I sort of resolved it, I thought I would share.
I have owned 2 domain names on GoDaddy for many years. They have always redirected to social networking sites. For the record, I have never hosted with GoDaddy and I never noticed any problems with their domain registration service.
It just so happened that today I received the GoDaddy.com Expiration Notice asking for manual renewal. After all my research about domain names and hosting, I decided to transfer the domains to Namecheap.com.
I transferred the domain names via Namecheap, but I knew in advance that I had to jump through a couple of hoops with GoDaddy such as unlocking my domain (although I never locked them in the first place) and also sending a request to have GoDaddy email me the EPP (Extensible Provisioning Protocol) for the two sites. The unlocked email notifications showed up around 12:45 pm from GoDaddy. The EPP details showed up by email a few minutes later.
I made my purchases on NameCheap around 1:30 pm and received confirmation. By 2:15 pm I received 2 emails from NameCheap asking me to approve the 2 transfers (had to click a link). It read, in part, "Once you have entered into the Agreement, the transfer will take place within five (5) calendar days unless the current registrar of record denies the request.
Once a transfer takes place, you will not be able to transfer to another registrar for 60 days, apart from a transfer back to the original registrar, in cases where both registrars so agree or where a decision in the dispute resolution process so directs."
I received 2 email mesages (in my NameCheap account) shortly after completing the purchase on NameCheap asking for the EPP info. It is a long, convoluted code with characters so I cut and pasted both codes into NameCheap.
About 20 minutes later I received 2 emails from GoDaddy reading that notice of a request to transfer was received from another registrar.
It read, in part "If you want to proceed with this transfer, you may accept it immediately or do nothing. If you wish to cancel the transfer prior to the auto-complete date, you must decline it before 21-Sep-2011." There was no link and not direction on how to accept immediately.
My concerns then became:
When will the transfer happen?
What happens to the emails that come in for those domains during the transfer?
What if I work late and cannot be available to set up the new email quickly once the Godaddy email goes down?
What error message will be sent to anyone who sends an email while the transfer is underway?
All of this concern is because the GoDaddy email was not clear on how one can force the approval to go through immediately. Nonetheless, after poking around for a while I discovered that I could get my 2 domains to transfer today instead of waiting until 9-21.
I logged into the GoDaddy account and in the Domains drop down menu I saw Pending Transfers. The 2 sites were listed.
There was a box to the left of each domain with a selection box and an Accept/Decline button in the toolbar. I selected both domains and hit Accept and OK.
My transfers were done by 4:30 pm.
But the process was NOT over. I do not yet have a hosting company (still trying to decide who to use) but I needed to set up my email from 1 of the transferred sites. It has been an active email for me for a few years with daily traffic.
I played around with the email set up for a while, made sure to "Transfer DNS To NameCheap Default DNS" and then I saw the email icons options pop up. I still could not get my email to work from the transferred domains. I watched a video on NameCheap and thought I figured it out. I was wrong. All test messages were undeliverable. I logged onto live chat at 5:13, still did not understand how to set it up through the chat representative and I was not seeing some of the links the representative told me to click. Finally the representative just set it up for me using my username and a support PIN.
I am not sure if she did that correctly though since I was still having problems setting up this email to work with Mozilla Thunderbird and Outlook. By 5:40 I was put on with a second rep, who did not seem at all interested in helping me. The second rep was to help me set up my email for Outlook and Mozilla. There is no phone number, only LIVE CHAT; however, this rep was not responsive at all. I had to constantly ask "Are you there?" "Is someone there?" An email test message that I sent from another account did finally show up at 5:51 pm so the email account was working (down for about 90 minutes due to the transfer).
I was still on with the second, unhelpful rep until 6:15 pm and I still had no more information than I did with rep 1 on setting up my transferred domain email to pull to Outlook and Mozilla. My email had been pulling into outlook for years (from Godaddy) but I could not get it to work with NameCheap's email.
I also could not get the email, which I now knew was working, to pull to Mozilla Thunderbird. Mozilla does not require more than the email address and password for set up, but in this case I received a pop up asking for IMAP or POP3 info (drop down menu). IMAP was selected so I selected POP3 and hit retest, still no luck.
Finally, at 6:20 pm the second rep, who was pretty much ignoring me during our LIVE CHAT said she would set up the records for me.
By 6:30 pm the rep set up the MX but it was still not clear to me what the issue was at all. We were still chatting, and finally by 6:40 pm the rep said that I had to set MX to point the domain to OX subscription. It was done for me by this second rep, but my email is supposedly not going to work properly for a few hours.
As of right now 8:52 pm, my email is working on the Open Xchange server but I cannot get that email on Mozilla Thunderbird. I will try again tomorrow.
Presumably it will not be this much of a problem to set up my email with Hostgator or Bluehost?
I have owned 2 domain names on GoDaddy for many years. They have always redirected to social networking sites. For the record, I have never hosted with GoDaddy and I never noticed any problems with their domain registration service.
It just so happened that today I received the GoDaddy.com Expiration Notice asking for manual renewal. After all my research about domain names and hosting, I decided to transfer the domains to Namecheap.com.
I transferred the domain names via Namecheap, but I knew in advance that I had to jump through a couple of hoops with GoDaddy such as unlocking my domain (although I never locked them in the first place) and also sending a request to have GoDaddy email me the EPP (Extensible Provisioning Protocol) for the two sites. The unlocked email notifications showed up around 12:45 pm from GoDaddy. The EPP details showed up by email a few minutes later.
I made my purchases on NameCheap around 1:30 pm and received confirmation. By 2:15 pm I received 2 emails from NameCheap asking me to approve the 2 transfers (had to click a link). It read, in part, "Once you have entered into the Agreement, the transfer will take place within five (5) calendar days unless the current registrar of record denies the request.
Once a transfer takes place, you will not be able to transfer to another registrar for 60 days, apart from a transfer back to the original registrar, in cases where both registrars so agree or where a decision in the dispute resolution process so directs."
I received 2 email mesages (in my NameCheap account) shortly after completing the purchase on NameCheap asking for the EPP info. It is a long, convoluted code with characters so I cut and pasted both codes into NameCheap.
About 20 minutes later I received 2 emails from GoDaddy reading that notice of a request to transfer was received from another registrar.
It read, in part "If you want to proceed with this transfer, you may accept it immediately or do nothing. If you wish to cancel the transfer prior to the auto-complete date, you must decline it before 21-Sep-2011." There was no link and not direction on how to accept immediately.
My concerns then became:
When will the transfer happen?
What happens to the emails that come in for those domains during the transfer?
What if I work late and cannot be available to set up the new email quickly once the Godaddy email goes down?
What error message will be sent to anyone who sends an email while the transfer is underway?
All of this concern is because the GoDaddy email was not clear on how one can force the approval to go through immediately. Nonetheless, after poking around for a while I discovered that I could get my 2 domains to transfer today instead of waiting until 9-21.
I logged into the GoDaddy account and in the Domains drop down menu I saw Pending Transfers. The 2 sites were listed.
There was a box to the left of each domain with a selection box and an Accept/Decline button in the toolbar. I selected both domains and hit Accept and OK.
My transfers were done by 4:30 pm.
But the process was NOT over. I do not yet have a hosting company (still trying to decide who to use) but I needed to set up my email from 1 of the transferred sites. It has been an active email for me for a few years with daily traffic.
I played around with the email set up for a while, made sure to "Transfer DNS To NameCheap Default DNS" and then I saw the email icons options pop up. I still could not get my email to work from the transferred domains. I watched a video on NameCheap and thought I figured it out. I was wrong. All test messages were undeliverable. I logged onto live chat at 5:13, still did not understand how to set it up through the chat representative and I was not seeing some of the links the representative told me to click. Finally the representative just set it up for me using my username and a support PIN.
I am not sure if she did that correctly though since I was still having problems setting up this email to work with Mozilla Thunderbird and Outlook. By 5:40 I was put on with a second rep, who did not seem at all interested in helping me. The second rep was to help me set up my email for Outlook and Mozilla. There is no phone number, only LIVE CHAT; however, this rep was not responsive at all. I had to constantly ask "Are you there?" "Is someone there?" An email test message that I sent from another account did finally show up at 5:51 pm so the email account was working (down for about 90 minutes due to the transfer).
I was still on with the second, unhelpful rep until 6:15 pm and I still had no more information than I did with rep 1 on setting up my transferred domain email to pull to Outlook and Mozilla. My email had been pulling into outlook for years (from Godaddy) but I could not get it to work with NameCheap's email.
I also could not get the email, which I now knew was working, to pull to Mozilla Thunderbird. Mozilla does not require more than the email address and password for set up, but in this case I received a pop up asking for IMAP or POP3 info (drop down menu). IMAP was selected so I selected POP3 and hit retest, still no luck.
Finally, at 6:20 pm the second rep, who was pretty much ignoring me during our LIVE CHAT said she would set up the records for me.
By 6:30 pm the rep set up the MX but it was still not clear to me what the issue was at all. We were still chatting, and finally by 6:40 pm the rep said that I had to set MX to point the domain to OX subscription. It was done for me by this second rep, but my email is supposedly not going to work properly for a few hours.
As of right now 8:52 pm, my email is working on the Open Xchange server but I cannot get that email on Mozilla Thunderbird. I will try again tomorrow.
Presumably it will not be this much of a problem to set up my email with Hostgator or Bluehost?
Stop by Paul's Pub - my little hangout on Facebook.