Domain Spotlight Tuesdays Maglite.com

What did I pick up from a trip to home depot a few weeks ago? The answer is I picked up items that I did not originally plan on purchasing. One of these items happens to be today’s domain spotlight. Get it? Maglite, spotlight alright enough of the corny jokes. What drew me to the product is the positioning next to the checkout in the store.

Since I needed a dependable flashlight I decided to spend a little more money than planned and upgraded the budget to suit a maglite. So what did I notice this time around? Well of course I noticed the domain name Maglite.com, since the company who designed the packaging for this product did such a wonderful job of positioning the domain on the front of the package. The wording is positioned towards to the bottom, right between the American manufacturer logo and the 2-Cell AA Size phrase.

My eyes were directed right towards the domain name, because of its premium position. Now that we have discussed the front of the packaging lets talk about what I noticed on the back. The back of the packaging states that the company name which is MAG INSTRUMENT, INC. as well as the corporate office mailing address, some basic warranty contact information and to my satisfaction two different domain names. In addition to the main domain the company is utilizing magmail.com to handle any and all email communication. What a smart idea! Why not have one domain name specifically for email and help desk communication.

Now the only dilemma that I see is if you try to view magmail.com in your browser it does not load anything. This is a problem I can not overlook, infact MAG INSTRUMENT, INC. should really do something about this. If it were up to me I would make sure that magmail.com redirected towards the main maglite.com website. Lets look into this just a little further. When in doubt open a Linux shell and issue the dig command. That is exactly what I did and I found some more interesting information:

dig magmail.com

; <<>> DiG 9.3.3rc2 <<>> magmail.com
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 24457
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 4, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;magmail.com. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
magmail.com. 900 IN A 208.202.73.10

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
magmail.com. 900 IN NS ns1.appsitehosting.com.
magmail.com. 900 IN NS ns2.appsitehosting.com.
magmail.com. 900 IN NS ns3.appsitehosting.com.
magmail.com. 900 IN NS ns4.appsitehosting.com.

;; Query time: 51 msec
;; SERVER: 199.34.120.1#53(199.34.120.1)
;; WHEN: Wed Oct 7 01:13:00 2009
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 132

So what does all this mean!? Well I am going to focus on what I see in the A record section for magmail.com as it provides me with the key to this interesting dilemma. As you have probably noticed the A records are pointed at the IP 208.202.73.10, I can almost bet that this IP is a primary email server or the central ip for the trouble ticket system / help desk.

Now to conclude this, I did buy the product. I have learned over the years that maglites are dependable so the branding has been quite effective. My only quirk revolves around the domain name magmail.com returning an error page when you try to visit it, instead of it not resolving in the browser it should redirect the visitor to an active website so no traffic is lost.