# Parked domain

A parked domain is one whose nameservers belong to a parking or for-sale service, so nobody runs a website or mailboxes there; if it still accepts mail, whoever collects it is not your customer.

Date: 2026-09-12

A parked domain is one whose nameservers belong to a parking or for-sale service — Sedo, ParkingCrew, Bodis, Afternic, Dan and their kind — so nobody runs a website or mailboxes there.
The registration is held for sale, for a lapsed project, or for the advertising a parking page earns. Most parked domains accept no mail at all; the ones that do are collecting it rather than delivering it to anyone who signed up.

## What Spaw answers

The field is `parked`, on both the address and the domain answer. It is read from the domain's NS records against a curated list of parking nameservers, and only once the domain has passed the mail-server check, so it is null on a domain with no MX record — that domain already answers [`no_mx_records`](/docs/reasons/no_mx_records). A parked domain that still accepts mail answers the verdict `risky` with the reason [`parked_domain`](/docs/reasons/parked_domain) and carries +60 on the score.

## What it does not mean

A registrar's default DNS is never on the list, because real sites run on it too; a domain a small company keeps on its registrar's own nameservers is not parked. And parked is a fact about the domain today, not about the address: a domain that was a real company and is parked now has lost its people, which is why the answer is to ask for another address rather than to keep sending.

Reference: https://spaw.co/glossary/parked-domain