In the wake of GDPR, public whois records are 100% redacted. There is lots of work going on to attempt to provide the data without violating privacy laws, but no one is there yet.
This came up because today I got email from Tucows asking me to verify and, if necessary, update my whois data. Now, Tucows is the registrar, so they know all of the data. But they sent me this
Gee, thanks. That’s so helpful.
Twitter has some opinions on #GDPR.
— @rianjohnson (Yes, the director of The Last Jedi)
For folks who aren’t following the discussion about whois records and GDPR compliance there’s a decent summary at vice.com: What Is Going to Happen With Whois?
Read MoreAl has a post listing some of the bad things some sender representatives do when approaching ISPs for delisting.
One of the things I would add to the list is hiding behind a privacy protected domain registration. No matter how you dice it, having a business domain behind privacy protection makes a company look illegitimate. For any company sending commercial mail, it’s not even an issue as senders are required by law to include an address in every email. With this sort of requirement, it’s not like customers aren’t going to be able to find them.
This is an issue I feel so strongly about, I will not represent senders to ISPs unless they have a valid, unprotected whois registration. I do offer consulting and other services to them, but will not contact the ISPs on their behalf. This is not the reputation I want to create with the ISPs for myself or my other clients.
I challenge anyone who is running a business and using a whois privacy protection service to put the same address in their whois record as is on every email you send out.
I challenge ISPs to stop offering whitelisting, FBL or other services to senders who insist on using whois privacy services.