Although I was immediately suspicious of the poor English, the Web site (which is also badly written) seems to be a legit Chinese company, involved in Internet consulting and domain registration. But even so, this could be a phony attempt to get me to register a bunch of overseas domains with them.
So I have a number of questions:
Should I take this at face value, or do you think they are just trying to scare me into buying some domains from them?
Can I register a domain with any country’s top-level domain suffix (.cn, .fr, etc.) with my usual (US-based) registrar, or do some domains have to be registered with certain companies/agencies/countries?
And bigger (and less factual) questions:
Is it worth it to register one’s business name in every possible TLD? There are five TLDs that most companies would qualify for (com, net, org, biz, info), then there are several hundred country TLDs, and finally the internationalized domain names in non-Roman alphabets. Plus .asia, for some reason. (No .europe, .africa, etc.)
Do some companies routinely register in every TLD possible? If not, how do you decide which to register?
What’s the downside to letting someone else have mydomainname.cn or .asia, or .hk, etc.? What do you do if someone registers your domain in Kyrgyzstan (.kg)?
For background, my company name is not my biggest brand. I publish a newsletter with a different name, and I own the usual domains (com, org, net, etc.) for both the company and the newsletter title. But the company name sites simply redirect to the newsletter site.
Although I’ve owned and used the company name for more than 15 years, it’s not trademarked, and it doesn’t figure significantly in my business marketing. So it’s not terribly important or valuable to me, and I’m not sure I’d want to spend what I imagine would be thousands of dollars to register every possible TLD.
My only reasons for wanting to even consider it are that I coined the word myself, and I might conceivably want to develop it into a more prominent brand in the future. But I have no immediate plans for such a move, and it may never happen.
FWIW I recently received a similar mail (but from another company, ds-china.org.cn , referring to the .asia, .cn, .co.in, .com.cn, .com.hk, .com.tw, .hk, .in, .net.cn, .org.cn and .tw versions of a .com domain name I use).
I did not reply, because I assume it’s the case the OP names in 1. - namely, that they just want to scare me into registering the domains through them.
One major red flag: you won’t get such mail from the bona fide domain registries because they do not routinely check for conflict with trade marks/other name rights - their T&C say this is the applicant’s responsibility. (except for some specific instances like the sunrise period of .eu - companies with a documented name right or trademark could register before the free-for-all started).
Another thing: No sane business will annoy and alienate a customer who has already placed an order (“Mr. John Sun”) for the sake of a possible customer (you), so “Mr. John Sun” obviously does not exist.
BTW, I like to reply to these emails with “Gosh, thanks for telling me about this - as a safeguard, I’ve registered those other domains you mentioned via my existing hosting and domain provider”
If you google “John Sun” and domain, you’ll find a lot of discussion of messages similar to the one you received. If John Sun exists, he’s busy trying to register a lot of different domains, and volcafe.asia is being astonishingly diligent in refusing what must be a small fortune in registration fees to protect your interest in your domain. It’s a scam.