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parked_domain

The domain is parked or for sale, and still accepts mail

The domain's nameservers belong to a parking or for-sale service, yet it has usable mail servers. Nobody runs mailboxes there; a server that accepts mail for a parked domain is collecting it.

appears in
reason
verdict
risky
risk weight
+60
credits
1 credit, like every deliverable or risky answer. Repeats of the same address are free for 7 days.

What it means

Parking services (Sedo, ParkingCrew, Bodis, Afternic, Dan and their kind) hold domains that are for sale or idle, and most of them accept no mail at all — those answer no_mx_records. A parked domain that does publish working mail servers is the exception worth naming: the mail is not going to a person who signed up, it is going to whoever collects it.

The check reads the domain's NS records against a curated list of parking nameservers, only once the domain has passed the mail-server check, so the flag is null on a domain with no MX. A registrar's default DNS is never on the list, because real sites run on it too. parked is true, the verdict is risky, and the weight of 60 puts the address in the high band by itself.

What to do

Treat the address as unusable for a signup: ask for another one. On an imported list, drop it; a domain that was a real company and is parked now has lost its people.

Example response 

{
    "email": "[email protected]",
    "deliverable": "risky",
    "reason": "parked_domain",
    "parked": true,
    "mx_found": true,
    "risk_score": 60
}

Abbreviated: a real answer carries all 46 fields, listed in the verify-email reference.

Related

markdown version: /docs/reasons/parked_domain.md