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Comment by dkrich | Hacker News Reader

The timing of this is interesting to me because I recently registered a new domain, opted to leave my contact info public, and have since received an unending barrage of spam emails that I have to attribute to the WHOIS record due to the timing.

I agree about publicly displaying contact info, but would like to know some good suggestions for filtering out the crap that comes with it.

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I have my contact info publicly available on all of my domains, and I don't see any specific signs that any of the spam I get is directly attributable to that. But I did get an email from a guy in Canada a couple of weeks ago, asking about buying one of my domains, which I sold to him. Personally I think the benefits of having valid whois info outweigh the negatives, but that's just me...

Whois privacy email addresses will forward incoming mails to you as well.

A buying offer can be a smart way to probe the owner behind that privacy wall, who I guess most of the time is just a normal guy/gal...

"Whois privacy email addresses"

A turn off for many buyers. They look like bogus addresses. Makes much more sense to take the effort to get a gmail account that looks legit and use that to filter. Then if you get to much spam simply get another gmail and change the whois. Etc.

I'm actually receiving a whole load of spam on one of the email addresses provided by my registrar's whois privacy service. I'm guessing that spammers don't care how ugly an email address looks, as long as they reach someone.

The forwarding thing sounds like a good idea. Not turning off people interested in one of my domain names is an awesome bonus.

Interesting.. I didn't realize that, as I've never bothered to pay the extra fee for the "private" registration. But I do use a less-important GMail account for the email contact, so at least my main email doesn't get swamped. But the phone number on there is actually my personal cellphone, which could be annoying if a lot of people started calling, but so far that doesn't seem to happen.

"But the phone number on there is actually my personal cellphone"

Use google voice number that forwards to your cellphone. Or better use a google voice number that doesn't go anywhere.

Sounds like good advice. I'd invest the time to do that, if I had an actual problem with getting too many unsolicited / spam phone calls. But it just doesn't happen at the moment. If I get bored one day, maybe I'll take the time to switch it over.

"But it just doesn't happen at the moment."

(Can't reply to this below).

Want to point out though that once the info is slurped and appears elsewhere you won't be able to put the genie back in the bottle.

I many times pull up old info for domains in search.

Now that's a fair point. Now that you have me thinking about this, maybe I'll make it a point to change it sooner than later after all. :-)

Edit: Done. Thanks for the nudge, larrys.

"Personally I think the benefits of having valid whois info outweigh the negatives"

Agree with that. As both a domain owner, registrar as well as someone who buys domains. There are definitely cases where privacy is warranted but not for the majority of people.

"I agree about publicly displaying contact info, but would like to know some good suggestions for filtering out the crap that comes with it."

Gmail account which is setup to forward to your regular email account. Or simply change to a new gmail if you get to much spam. I register domains all the time and have a single email account that represents a large quantity of domains. I don't find the spam to be a big problem at all.

Thanks for the advice- I'll give that a try. I'm kind of pissed that I didn't think to do that in the first place.

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