---
title: "Five Days From Cutoff, Inventory Was Wrong"
canonical: https://dxdev.com/blog/2026-09-26_inventory-audit-near-cutoff/
datePublished: 2026-09-26
---
A customer asking who set up their domain turned into finding that our migration tracker was wrong about 85 sites, five days before we were due to switch off the address 96 of them still point at.

## What I did about the tracker

I filed the tracker fix, and a plan to keep those sites alive rather than let them go dark. I also built the per-domain research for the personal outreach.

## The contact source was wrong for nearly half

We sent a personalised domain-migration warning to 94 customer accounts (216 people) whose sites go dark when the old server address is retired. We built the audience from scratch when the contact source we had assumed turned out to be wrong for nearly half of them. Along the way we found and excluded customers who had already left the platform, customers whose domains were no longer registered, and customers who had already migrated.

## A warning for blocked domain forwarding

We shipped a change to production that warns customers when domain forwarding is blocking the change they are being asked to make, names their registrar, and shows the same detail to support staff.

I filed two tickets covering the stale mailer deadlines and the twelve customers who need a different message.

## Recovery emails that would have said the same thing to everyone

I also sent recovery emails to 26 customers whose site-expiration notices had hard-bounced during a reverse-DNS outage, and confirmed every one of them was actually delivered.

The prepared drafts would have sent everyone the same email. People had originally been sent three different versions, depending on how far along they were. Reading the real send log instead of the account flags fixed that, and it also caught one person the system had already re-contacted.