Dozens of my clients have received an email from what appears to be a caring registrar from China letting them know that some nasty company is about to register a .CN domain name incorporating their trademark.

Today, I got one of these emails myself. It goes like this:

This email is from China domain name registration center, which mainly deal with the domain name registration in China and Asia. We received an application from [some company nobody knows] on [very recent date]. They want to register “[one of my .COM domain names minus .COM]” as their internet keyword and China/Asia/Hongkong (CN/ASIA/HK) domain names. But after checking it, we find this name conflicts with your company. In order to deal with this matter better, so we send you email and confirm whether this company is your distributor or business partner in China or not?

I always tell my clients to simply ignore these emails, the same way they ignore spam about buying replica watches, receiving inheritance from a Nigerian prince or enlarging their manhood.

Just because someone is trying to sell you something you don’t need by mentioning your trademark should not make the purchase any more desirable.

Most of us don’t need a .CN domain name. This is why we haven’t applied to register one in the first place.

Don’t feel obligated to reciprocate a good act of a stranger: no one is trying to register your trademark as a Chinese domain name. In reality, someone is simply trying to sell you something you don’t need by creating artificial urgency and scarcity that simply isn’t there.

So again, the correct way to respond to such emails is by pressing a delete button.

Your trademarks are your valuable assets. But there are much better ways to protect your intellectual property compared to buying up useless domain names.