Client book starter
Paste up to 25 of your clients’ domains and your browser looks up the registrar and its website, the expiry date and how many days are left, the nameservers and the last-changed date for each, and can check the HTTPS certificate’s expiry too. You get a table, and a CSV the Yven importer accepts, so the first draft of your client book is a download instead of an afternoon of logins.
Where each answer comes from
Your browser asks the registry for the registrar and expiry date over RDAP, so those requests come from your connection and not from Yven. The registrar and its website, the nameservers and the last-changed date all come from the same registry answer as the expiry date, and the Expires cell says which source gave the date. “Days left” counts from today on your computer, and anything within 60 days is shown in bold. If your browser can’t get a date (some registries refuse requests from web pages, and some extensions have no RDAP service), the page asks Yven’s server to try RDAP and then WHOIS, which a browser can’t do, and the cell says “via Yven”. If you tick the certificate box, that part always goes through the server. If nothing answers, the table says “Not found” and doesn’t guess.
Not every extension answers. I tested every one, and the RDAP coverage page lists which return an expiry date and which don’t. For the ones that don’t, the table will show gaps, and you’ll need the date from the registrar account or a renewal email.
Importing the CSV
The CSV uses the importer’s columns. I fill client_name with the domain, because the importer skips rows without one, so rename those to your clients before you import. Each domain gets a domain row, and an SSL row when a certificate was read. Then follow the importing steps: upload, map columns, preview and import. The preview shows what will be created before anything is written. The CSV also has provider_url and nameservers columns, which the importer ignores, but they’re handy to keep.
What happens to your list
Your domains aren’t saved, and I don’t tie a run to you. The domains go from your browser to rdap.org and the registry, so those services see your IP address and the domain, as they would for any lookup. Yven only sees a domain when the page falls back to the server for a WHOIS lookup or you tick the certificate box. To keep the servers from being hammered, each IP address is limited to a set number of those server lookups an hour, and I keep a scrambled version of the address for that hour to count them. Server results for a domain are cached for up to a day, because the registry data is public. The only thing sent to analytics is that a run happened, never the domains.
What it doesn’t do
When the certificate box is ticked, it checks the certificate on the domain as typed, without www, and it doesn’t check subdomains. The certificate’s chain isn’t verified, so an expired or self-signed certificate still shows its date. It can’t see who pays for the domain, who manages it, or whether auto-renew is on. That’s what the other columns in a client book are for.