Domain name management can be a surprisingly complicated job, especially when it comes to transferring domains – you have to learn the systems of each individual registrar you’ll deal with.
Registrar companies’ systems range from hyper-complicated (we’re looking at you, GoDaddy!) to undocumented and unhelpful, to outright user hostile (such as the questionable tactics used by the Domain Registry of Canada which are quite well documented.)
Understandably, these registrars are not eager to lose business so they don’t go out of their way to enable outbound domain transfers. Persistence and a little righteous irritation can carry you a long way in cases where you have to wrest your customers’ domain names away from expensive, bloated or exploitative companies.
I recently struggled to get two domain names away from Yahoo! They have posted helpful-looking instructions here to help you take your business elsewhere, but these instructions seem incomplete. After following them to the letter, our customer (the owner of an @yahoo.com email address) failed to get her transfer confirmation emails, three times in a row.
Feeling tenacious and righteously irritated, we changed the administrative contact’s email account to one of our @aloeroot.com email addresses and still the transfers failed. The confirmation emails were never delivered.
Finally we turned off the Private Registration option, waited a day or two, and queued the transfers up a fifth time. This seemed to be the magic formula: make sure private registration is disabled and voila – we have found our way out of the labyrinth.
We hedged our bet by continuing to use a non-Yahoo email account for the admin contact – the key may have been in disabling the private registration but in order to save experimentation time we recommend following our method. We sincerely hope these instructions are useful to you in your quest to create customer satisfaction.