Your domain name expires
A lapsed registration is not a billing inconvenience; it is a DNS outage. When the registry withdraws the delegation, the NS records disappear from the parent zone and every name under the domain stops resolving — MX and A alike, so mail and website fail together.
The stages after the expiry date
Registries differ in the exact windows, but the shape is consistent.
- Expiry: the delegation is withdrawn or redirected. Resolution fails; senders start queueing and then bouncing.
- Grace period (typically ~30 days): you can still renew at the normal price.
- Redemption (typically ~30 days more): renewal is possible but carries a restoration fee, often several times the annual price.
- Release: the name goes back into the pool and anyone may register it — including the mail history attached to it.
Why it is worse than a website going down
A website that fails returns an error a visitor can see. Mail queues silently at the sender for hours or days before bouncing, so you learn about it from a customer rather than from a monitor. And whoever registers the name afterwards receives everything addressed to it: password resets, invoices, anything still in an address book.
What to check
The scan at the bottom of this page reads the expiry date over RDAP (the structured successor to WHOIS) and reports it alongside the records, together with the registrar where the registry publishes it. It is shown separately from the score: an expiring registration is urgent, but it is not a mail setting.
Not every registry publishes an expiry date. When it is absent we report unknown rather than guessing — including for .be, where DNS Belgium does not release it over RDAP.
Frequently asked questions
Auto-renew is on. Am I safe?
Only if the card behind it is still valid. An expired payment method is the most common way an auto-renewing domain lapses, and the notice goes to whichever address is on the registrar account — often one nobody reads any more.
Can I recover it after release?
Only by registering it again, if nobody else did first. Valuable names are caught by drop-catching services within seconds of release.