There is a residual cleanup problem with registrants who were with Tucows/OpenSRS and had their domains come up for renewal since late August. Tucows would not renew them and it was hard for registrants to find another registrar that would. Doytchin spent quite a bit of time looking and I think the only one he found that would accept a transfer of both the third level domain and the email forwarding service was 007names.

This meant a lot of domains expired. Worse, some entered the Redemption Period, where they can no longer be transferred to another registrar - the only option is to redeem through Tucows and they will not do it.

The practical solution seems to be: 1. If the domain is expired but still within the grace period, transfer it now; 2. It it entered the redemption period, wait until it becomes available again (up to 35 days) and re-register through a registrar like 007names to recover it.

Quite unsatisfactory on the part of Tucows (the biggest registrar of third level domains by far), to let all this happen and they really should offer subsidised redemption for affected domains in the redemption grace period.