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What comes with the domain and what you keep

You'll know which inboxes and which email history go with the sale of the business, which ones you keep, and you'll have it written into the contract before signing.

By Yodai · Published on September 6, 2026 · Updated on October 12, 2026

You can test almost everything you touch in your business's domain and email as you go; a sale, you sign once, and there's no dry run that counts. You sign the sale of the business. The buyer gets the website, the domain, the customer list. Everything moves fast, until someone asks: what about the emails? Who keeps reservations@yourdomain.com and the three years of conversations inside it?

If you haven't decided this before signing, you'll end up hashing it out that same day, with the buyer sitting across from you and the attorney waiting. It's better to have it settled before you sit down at that table.

What's tied to the business

The domain transfers in full, no exceptions: it's the business's address, not yours. And the role-based inboxes, reservations@, orders@, hello@, go with it, history included.

Every email inside is a conversation between the business and the business's customer, not between you and anyone else. This is where it shows whether you did your homework from the earlier lessons in this course: if those mailboxes never carried your name, handing them over doesn't expose you to anything. The buyer gets a working file, not your personal correspondence. The law backs this up too: under Article 21 of Spain's Organic Law on Data Protection, when a business changes hands, it's presumed lawful, unless proven otherwise, for customer data to pass to the buyer, even before the deal closes, as long as it's necessary for the sale to go through. And if the deal ultimately falls through, the buyer has to delete any data they received right away.

It also shows whether you managed access well whenever someone joined or left the team: if every departure was handled by changing a password, as you saw earlier in this course, there's no personal account hanging off a business inbox that you now have to untangle in a rush.

The technical transfer of the domain is separate from the email, and you need to request it ahead of time, because it doesn't depend on you alone. The change of ownership to the buyer's name is handled by the registrar you have the domain with, the same one you moved it to under the business account at the start of this course, and it needs a yes from both sides. For a .es domain, Dominios.es calls this a transmisión: you or your registrar start it, and the person the buyer names as the new administrative contact confirms it from their own Dominios.es account. For a .com domain, ICANN's Transfer Policy requires the registrar to reject the change unless both the previous owner and the new one have authorized it.

If the buyer also wants to move the .com domain to their own registrar, yours will give you a transfer code, with up to five calendar days to hand it over if you can't pull it yourself from your account. Once the transfer is requested, your registrar has another five days to respond; if it doesn't, the transfer is considered approved. Request that transfer before the change of ownership: do it the other way around, and the registrar locks the domain for 60 days with no way to move it elsewhere, unless it let you waive that lock before requesting the change. That's what the policy version that's been mandatory since August 2025 says. The ICANN group that reviewed it recommends, in its final report, dropping this lock and the confirmation from both owners, the previous one and the new one; until that change takes effect, the lock and double confirmation still apply. That's why all of this needs to start before the handover date, not on the day itself.

What doesn't get sold, even if it lives on the same domain

There are two things that don't come with the package even though they technically live on the domain you're selling, and it's worth separating them, because they don't carry the same weight.

The first: any inbox you used for something of your own, even if it was just for convenience. If you ever set up an email with your name on that domain and used it for personal bills or another project, that content is yours. Pull it out before you sell; don't leave it to negotiate afterward, when you no longer have any leverage.

The second one is more dangerous because it's not obvious at first glance: the recovery email on your personal accounts. Your personal Google account, social media, even the registrar where you keep your private domains. If any of those accounts sends its recovery code to an email address on your business domain, the day after the sale, the buyer gets that code, not you.

Go through this one by one, account by account, before you sit down to sign, and give yourself plenty of time. On a Google account, for example, the recovery email helps you get back in if you forget your password, and according to Google's help center, if you change it, codes can still go to the old address for seven days. There's no shortcut: you have to open every important service and check which email is set as the recovery address.

How to put it in writing

The difference between a smooth handover and a last-minute argument comes down to how the contract is written, not the good faith of the parties involved. Good faith runs out the moment an inbox shows up that nobody mentioned.

This wraps up the access plan that's guided the whole course: your own account from day one, role-based email addresses, a departure that only means changing a key, a suspicion that cuts access before asking questions, a name change handled in order. The sale is the last moment when all of that gets tested at once, and if every piece is written down, there's nothing to argue about that day: you just follow the list.

In Yodai you connect the domain you already have to your site, and it stays registered where it is, in your name. See how your own domain for your website works.