Get Your .ml Domain Back

Get Your .ml Domain Back

I know clearly about what will happen if I write this post in Chinese. The .ml TLD is always dedicated to provide domains for those who can’t afford it. So if you really want to get your domain back and want to do something right with it, just follow the post.

And I pray that you don’t translate, adapt or republish this article. Don’t make it known by the “domain thief”. You know why Mali withdraw the domains, right?

How did I found the way

I’m sure you have searched on the Internet about “Freenom ml”, and I did so. In a Reddit post, I found the site of Mali NIC, which is NIC ML. You can see the notice, it read,

Notice: As of July 19th, 2023 the .ml ccTLD registry is in transition of back-end registry systems and day-to-day operations.

Data provided by Freenom has been inported into the AGETIC registry.

WHOIS Server https://whois.nic.ml/ or whois.nic.ml:43

More information will provided in the near future.

As the notice read, data of Freenom should be imported to their database. So our situation should be an error.

You can see the email address of the managers on this site. They provided Administrative Contact and Technical Contact. Clearly, the situation of ours is technical.

With a mindset of giving it a try, I sent an email to the technical contact, who is Adama TRAORE. I won’t provide their certain address here in order to avoid spam, you should find it on the NIC ML website yourself.

Send an email

Now we’re going to send an email.

Note: Chinese users should not send email via QQ Mail. Their mail system is against emails from qq.com.

I provided the information below, you can modify some, depends on your self.

  • My domain name

  • A short description of the situation, containing:

    • DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN error when accessing the site
    • Query result on the NIC Whois site
    • Error message of Cloudflare

  • NS records I needed (e.g. NS 1: benedict.ns.cloudflare.com NS 2: monika.ns.cloudflare.com. It should be important)

Then send it!

But wait. Remember to note your time. Mali is a UTC+00:00 country, so you may have to send the email before the daybreak to adapt to their working hours. I sent my emails between UTC 9:00 to UTC 17:00, this is a normal working hour in the world. I’m not sure whether your message will be received or not if you don’t send it in proper time. No matter what, this is basic social etiquette.

Wait for reply

I received the reply just after 5 minutes. I sent the email in the afternoon (in Mali).

In the reply, Adama said that they will reactivate your domain and inform you that we will do more free domain. The reply also has an sign of AGETIC.

The final result

Your domain should be reactivated soon. You can check it at https://whois.nic.ml/.

You will notice that it is CL_manager instead of you owns this domain. But that’s normal; Freenom does this too.

Your domain will be activated for a year, and you can continue using it in Cloudflare (or DNSPod, etc., if you like).

Postscript

In further communicate, I asked Adama about the future of the .ml TLD. According to Adama, we can confirm that an online payment and management platform is being developed for .ml domains.

An article on the AGETIC’s website with the title of Information note relating to the repatriation of the technical management of the point ML (Note d’information relative au rapatriement de la gestion technique du point ML) may be related and useful (but I can’t read French).

If you have some idea, fell free to comment below.

Giscus