Which names look like yours?

One letter is swapped for another that draws almost the same: a lowercase "l" for an "i", a zero for an "o", "rn" for an "m". Nothing is misspelled to the eye, and reading more slowly does not help. This is the technique that reads as yours in a signature block.

Your exact name with an accent on it. Internationalized domain names make this a perfectly regular registration, and a French-speaking reader stops seeing the difference entirely, because in French an accent is what they expect.

One letter removed. It is the commonest genuine typing mistake, which is exactly what makes the name worth registering: part of your own traffic arrives there by itself, with nobody having sent anything.

Two neighbouring letters change places. Read at speed, the word is still yours: we recognise words by their shape and by their first and last letters, not letter by letter.

A letter held a fraction of a second too long. Same family as the one above, and just as invisible in an address bar or in the From line of a message.

A letter replaced by the key right beside it on the keyboard. The mistake is physical rather than visual, so it catches traffic more than readers, and the name costs a few dollars a year to hold.

The name is exactly yours; only what follows the dot changes. Nothing is misspelled at all, and a reader who knows your brand has no reason to look at the ending.

Your name, plus a word that fits the context: payments, invoices, support, careers. This is the family behind the 705 names registered against a cosmetics brand in three weeks, every one of them built around hiring.

• It sends no email, to you or to anyone. It asks DNS which names exist, the way any mail server does before writing to you.
• It does not browse the sites it finds. It reads the first answer of a server and stops there, never the content of a page.
• There is no account to create, no card, and no address to hand over to get the result.
• It is a sample, not an inventory of the registry. It tests the most plausible mistakes on your name and a few neighbouring endings, not every name in the world that resembles yours.
• It says nothing about intent. A name that answers may be parked by a reseller, held by a legitimate business, or yours and forgotten.
• It is a snapshot of one moment. A name registered this morning may not have propagated everywhere yet.

Not on its own, and this page never says it is. What matters is what the name can already do: whether it can send email, whether it serves a page, and how long it has existed. The one that can send email is the first to look at, because an invoice sent from that address would reach your customers with nothing to stop it.

Because the useful life of these names is measured in days. In one published review of more than 600 of them, the average was under seven days of activity. A check run once a year has roughly one chance in fifty of landing inside that window; the rest of the time it finds nothing and reassures.

We open one connection and read the first answer of the server: the status code, the address it redirects to if it redirects, and the certificate it presents. We never read the content of a page, and nothing is submitted to any form.

Because the registration date comes from a public registry that answers on a best-effort basis, and it is the first thing we drop when the check is short of time. "Age not established" means exactly that, and it is never read as "old": treating an unanswered query as a reassuring answer is the one mistake this page refuses to make.

Yes, and they are lifted out of the count. A name is filed as yours when we observed it: it redirects to your site, its certificate covers your domain, or its name servers or mail servers sit under it. Each line says which of those we saw, so you can disagree with the reasoning rather than with the verdict.

No. This is not a takedown service, not brand protection and not a legal step. We do not talk to registrars and we do not file complaints on your behalf. We tell you what exists, what it can do, and when that changes.

No, and nobody can state that on your behalf. Knowing which names pass for yours is one of the external security measures an organization is expected to maintain, and this page shows you where you stand on that specific point. CyberAzimut is not a certification body.