This domain name has already been used as an alias or domain

At least, that's what Google Apps says, so it must be true.

In my previous post I told about this domain that I lusted for, and bought, or thought I had. Now the waiting period is over, and it's indeed fully mine. Nice. So I can recommend GoDaddy auctions after all. In particular the close-out sales. However, when I activated the domain and started adding it as a domain alias to one of my existing Google Apps domains I found out that buying a used domain can have its downsides also.

The previous owner also thought that Google Apps was nice. And because Google Apps is free there's no trigger anywhere to delete a domain once the previous owner is no longer using it. (And no way to force ownership re-verification).

Luckily I use another free service that came to my rescue in this case: EditDNS.Net. I use it for some of my domains for its DNS hosting abilities, but it also has E-mail forwarding powers. Perfect. The interface for editing DNS records at GoDaddy is terrible anyway, so I wasn't sad to switch the domain to EditDNS. And I've suggested the ability to re-verify ownership to Google, so one of these days they may add it.

What if the previous owner had also liked EditDNS and registered his domain there? And had used a bunch of other useful free services? Then my domain would be less and less useful I suppose. Hopefully owners of free services will pick up on this and start adding ways to free abandoned domains!