Check domain age
Your thresholds
How it works
Reduce to the real domain
Paste URLs, mailboxes or bare hostnames. Everything is stripped back to the name that is actually registered, because subdomains have no registration date of their own.
Ask the registry
The lookup goes to RDAP, the structured replacement for WHOIS that registries publish themselves. No scraped WHOIS text, no third-party database, no cached guess.
Read the events
Registration, expiration, last change and transfer dates come back as real timestamps, alongside the registrar and the EPP status codes attached to the name.
Judge it for sending
Age is scored against the warmup threshold you set, and expiry against the length of the campaign you are about to run. You get a verdict, not just a date.
What a registration date actually tells you
Age on its own is not reputation. A domain registered in 2009 that has never sent a message has exactly as much sending history as one registered this morning. What age does buy you is the absence of a specific, very loud signal: a name that appeared days ago and immediately started contacting strangers.
Filters weight that signal heavily because it is cheap for them and expensive for spammers. Burner domains are disposable by design, so recency correlates tightly with abuse. Nothing you configure — not perfect authentication, not a warmed pool, not clean copy — fully compensates for a domain that is four days old.
The thresholds I use on client fleets
Register, configure DNS, then leave the domain alone for two weeks before a single message leaves it. Start warmup at day fourteen and keep it to a trickle. Begin real campaign volume somewhere past day thirty, and treat day ninety as the point where the domain stops being the constraint and your list quality becomes the constraint instead.
Those numbers are the defaults in the form above, and they are deliberately editable. If you are sending twenty highly targeted emails a day, you can move faster than someone pushing two thousand. The point is to have a number you apply consistently across the fleet rather than deciding domain by domain under deadline pressure.
Aged domains are not the shortcut they look like
Buying an aged domain replaces one unknown with a worse one. You inherit whatever the previous owner did with it, and drop-catch domains are frequently caught precisely because they had traffic — which sometimes means they had complaints. An old registration date sitting on a poisoned history is worse than a clean new domain you warmed properly.
If you do buy aged, check the name against public blocklists before it goes anywhere near a sending pool, and look at what the domain used to host. The blacklist checker is the fastest first pass.
Expiry is the failure nobody plans for
On a fleet of four hundred sending domains, renewals are a recurring operational risk rather than an afterthought. A domain that lapses mid-sequence does not degrade gracefully: DNS stops resolving, authentication evaporates, replies bounce, and the sequences pointed at it keep running as if nothing happened.
That is why every result here carries an expiry countdown, not just a date. Run the whole fleet through in one paste, sort by what is closest to lapsing, and fix the renewals before the calendar does it for you.
Where the data comes from
This is the one tool on the site that does not run entirely in your browser. Registry RDAP servers do not permit direct requests from web pages, so the lookup is relayed through this site — nothing about it is stored, logged or retained, and each response is cached briefly to spare the registries needless load.
RDAP coverage is universal across gTLDs and most ccTLDs, but a handful of country registries publish nothing machine-readable at all. Those come back marked as having no record rather than pretending to a date, because a confident wrong answer is worse than an honest gap.
Once age looks acceptable, the records are the next thing to confirm — the domain and email infrastructure checker covers NS, MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC for the same list in one pass.
Age thresholds at a glance
| Age | What it can do | Risk |
|---|---|---|
| 0–14 days | Nothing. DNS and provisioning only. | Sending here is the single loudest spam signal available. |
| 14–30 days | Warmup at a trickle. | High. Keep volume minimal and replies genuine. |
| 30–90 days | Real campaign volume, ramping. | Moderate. Watch placement closely as you scale. |
| 90+ days | Full planned volume. | Domain age stops being the constraint; list quality takes over. |
Those are the defaults in the form and they are editable on purpose — twenty highly targeted sends a day tolerates a faster ramp than two thousand. What matters is applying one number consistently across a fleet rather than deciding domain by domain under deadline pressure.
Age is also only one input. A domain past 90 days with no authentication is worse off than a 30-day domain with clean SPF, DKIM and DMARC — check both together with the domain checker.
Frequently asked questions
How is domain age calculated?
From the registration event published by the registry to today, in whole calendar years, months and days. It is the date the name was first created at the registry, not the date it was transferred to your current registrar and not the date the website went live.
Does an older domain really deliver better?
It removes a penalty rather than granting a bonus. Age gets you past the recency signal that filters apply to brand-new senders; from that point delivery is decided by authentication, list quality, complaint rate and volume discipline. An old domain with a bad list still lands in spam.
How old should a domain be before I send cold email from it?
Two weeks minimum before anything sends, warmup only until roughly day thirty, and full campaign volume after that. Ninety days is where the domain stops being your limiting factor. Set your own numbers in the thresholds above and apply them to the whole fleet.
Why does it show a different domain than the one I pasted?
Subdomains and mailboxes are not registered independently, so anything like mail.example.com or an email address resolves up to the registrable name that owns it. The result labels which name was actually queried.
Why did some domains come back with no record?
Either the name is genuinely unregistered, or its registry does not publish RDAP — several European ccTLDs still do not. A no-record result is not proof a domain is available; check with a registrar before assuming it is.
Is this WHOIS?
It is RDAP, the protocol that replaced WHOIS for structured registration data. Dates come back as real timestamps instead of free text in whatever format each registry felt like emitting, which is why bulk checking is reliable here and unreliable when scraping WHOIS.
Are my domains logged?
No. Queries are relayed to the registry and the result is returned to you — nothing is written to a database, tied to you, or kept. Responses are briefly cached by domain name only, in the same way any CDN caches a public lookup.
Can I check a whole sending fleet at once?
Up to thirty names per run, which is a comfortable batch for registry rate limits. Paste them one per line, then use Copy CSV to pull the results into a spreadsheet and sort by expiry or age across as many batches as you need.
How old should a domain be before sending cold email?
Register it, configure DNS, then leave it alone for two weeks before a single message goes out. Start warmup around day fourteen at a trickle, begin real campaign volume past day thirty, and treat day ninety as the point where age stops being your constraint and list quality becomes it instead.
Does an older domain deliver better?
Only up to a point, and age is not reputation. A domain registered in 2009 that has never sent mail has exactly as much sending history as one registered this morning. What age buys is the absence of a very loud signal — a name that appeared days ago and immediately started contacting strangers, which filters weight heavily because it correlates so tightly with abuse.
Should I buy an aged domain for cold email?
It replaces one unknown with a worse one. You inherit whatever the previous owner did with it, including sending history and any blocklist entries you cannot see from the registration date. A fresh domain with a disciplined ramp is more predictable than an aged domain with a past you cannot audit.
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The diagnostics here are free and always will be. When the fix is bigger than a DNS record, this is the work I do.
Deliverability rescue
Mail landing in spam, replies gone quiet, or a domain suddenly blocked. I find the actual cause rather than guessing, and fix it.
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Email & sending infrastructure
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Domain, DNS & migration
Changing registrar, mail provider or host without a day of downtime or a week of mail silently failing.
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- MX, SSL and subdomain cutover
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Monitoring & retainer
Infrastructure drifts. Records get edited, certificates expire, domains get listed. Ongoing eyes on the fleet.
- Scheduled checks across every domain
- Alerts before your clients notice
- Monthly reporting
- Priority response when something breaks
Start with a call
Bring a domain and the symptom. I will tell you what is actually wrong and whether you need me at all — plenty of people leave that call able to fix it themselves.
Thirty minutes, no pitch
We will run the checks together on your actual domains, and you will leave knowing what is broken, what it takes to fix, and what it should cost. If that is a job you can do in-house, I will say so.