Have you noticed a spike in the number of spam email messages you’ve been receiving, but have no idea why? The answer could be as easy as that new domain name you just registered.
Exposing Ryan’s Privates
ICANN policy requires that domain name owners provide a valid address, phone and email address or risk losing their domain. What they fail to tell you is that doing so exposes your privates; name, address, phone number, and email. That information is publicly available to anyone performing a “whois” on your domain name. Spammers and unscrupulous email list brokers harvest that information and sell it. Once your information is harvested, what can you do to stop the spam?
Keeping Your Email Address Private
While this technique won’t stop spam completely, it will keep your real email address hidden. Somewhere in your domain name’s control panel should be an email privacy feature that replaces your real email address with a randomly generated address that forwards any mail to your real address. Yes, the randomly generated address can still be harvested, but the system will change it every few days, thereby rendering the old one useless to the spammers. However, your other information like name and mailing address is still exposed.
Private Domain Name Registration
This method is by far the best for protecting your information from prying eyes and spammers. Your domain name registrar should offer the option of enabling a privacy manager, sometimes called whois protection. Instead of displaying your information, a proxy service or your registrar’s information is shown instead. The only ones that can breach that veil of privacy are law enforcement investigating a crime or a court order. Some registrars will charge a substantial fee for whois protection while others give it away for free and renew it at a drastically reduced price.
Should A Business Hide Its Information?
A wise choice would be to hide the information at the registrar level, but have it available somewhere on your website or blog on a Contact Us page. How much you choose to expose is up to you. Consider creating a graphical image of the information to prevent automated robots from harvesting the text from the page. Contact forms can be used on your site to automatically forward messages from visitors to you while keeping your email address hidden from email harvesters.
Author AJ Farro recommends getting free whois protection the next time you register a domain name. Also, help save the earth by using environmentally friendly web hosting for your new domain. Click here to view a list of deeply discounted green web hosting providers.
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