I don't know enough about these things to be of much help, but until someone more knowledgeable chimes in, I might suggest going to the Network Solutions site (or some other registrar like Namecheap.com) and searching for the site name (without the '.com' or '.net' ending) and see if it's available. If so, you can simply re-purchase it. If not, you may be able to do a "whois" search and see if someone else has purchased it in the amount of time it was expired. If so, you may be out of luck. :-(

Thanks to zep, owbist, and mikie for the responses. To owbist: Yes, I should have been more clear about what I'm looking for, but I am something of a novice in these matters, so I wasn't sure how to express myself. I am looking to register a domain name, but I am not yet interested in getting a whole website going. I would just -- at this point -- want to get an email account going using the domain. (I believe Fastmail is one service that will provide email for people who bring a domain name with them, right ? I think Lavabit might as well.) I realize I *could* just go with the Everyone.net email service, but I didn't know if that would end up a more expensive route in the long run. I thought first registering a domain name with someone and then finding an email service to host it would be cheaper and might leave me in more control of things, so to speak. Any further suggestions appreciated (while I look into the sites already mentioned above by zep and mikie). Thanks ! Scott

A lot of place's if you do a search for the name they also have a 'whois' feature to look to see who its registered to.Thier are also some sites(forget the name off hand)that the second its free it grabs it for another person waiting for it.

I'm no expert but it appears to me that it is "up for auction"? theacademicadvantage.com listing at godaddy.com