Domain name privacy
When you purchase of a domain name, personal contact information is required. This data goes into the public WHOIS database, which lists the owners of all domain names in existence.
The information required includes your name, address, email, and telephone number.
The WHOIS information has legitimate uses for technical and legal areas, but it is misused by spammers, junk mailers, and telemarketers. A common use of the WHOIS info is for domain name scams (see our article).
In our opinion the ‘bad’ uses of WHOIS for spam and scams outweighs the ‘good’ technical and legal uses. Thus, we’ve made use of private registrations, which allow us to register domain names for our clients that safeguard their privacy.
A privately-registered domain uses a third party’s contact info, who receives all correspondence on your behalf. They throw away all the spam, and forward any legitimate mail to you. Private registrations have eliminated junk mail for owners of .COM, .NET, and .ORG domains.
Unfortunately, .US and some other domains do not allow private registrations. In that case, we will use a second address line with the words: “Dept. Junk”. This makes it easy to identify and discard mail that was addressed with your WHOIS data. Anyone who contacts you legitimately (say, to inquire about buying your domain) should be smart enough to omit the second address line.
March 29th, 2007 at 11:30 am
[…] Additionally, the RegisterFly wreck caused me to rethink my use of private domain registrations. These allowed us to hide the real owner’s name from the public database of domain owners, and eliminated the junk mail problem. […]