Spooky Emails About your Domain Name

You should remember the registrar you used to get your domain name, and your login should use a very long and complex password. Personally, I use Network Solutions. It's easier for me to manage all my sites that way. Their a bit more expensive, but by consolidating all my domains with them I tend to get some pretty fast attention when one of my clients needs something special.

It's important that your domain name registrar is able to contact you if needed. So important that registrars are required to remind their clients once a year to keep their accounts current.

This is because an accurate "WHOIS" record is part of a valid domain record. If ICANN or your registrar needs to contact you in the future for some crazy reason; and your contact data is no good or out of date; they'll shut down your domain name in order to find you. That's not good for business.

The above is an example of legitimate domain registrar contact. Now for the illegitimate domain name stuff:

You will get phony invoices, statements and "advice" - both in your email inbox and your snail mailbox - from companies with similar and official sounding names. They will try to get you to flip your domain name over to their service, so that all your future registration payments will go to them. They are hoping that you will have forgotten the name of your actual domain name's registrar.

My recent favorite is an email warning you that some firm by the name "Sailon Industrial Co., Ltd" is plotting to register the various Asian versions of your domain name. Presumably they will be happy to register all these names for you instead. Never mind that Sailon Industrial has no domain of its own, or much in the way of search results.

All this bogus "noise" about your domain name is unfortunate, because we become so used to ignoring the frantic and phony messages. Therefore, we might discount or disregard the legitimate update requests from our own registrar when they arrive.

This is why it's so important to remember the correct name of your domain name registrar, and verify that against any domain name correspondence you get. But don't just ignore them all by habit.