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 thisGee, thanks. That’s...
GDPR and Whois data
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? The problem, briefly stated, is that ICANN has agreements with the thousands of domain registrars around the globe like GoDaddy or HostGator which oblige the companies to post WHOIS data—such as names, emails, and phone...
Whois privacy protection
I’ve talked about using privacy protection on domains in the past (here, here, here, here, and here). Short version (if you don’t want to check all the old links) is that privacy protection for commercial domains is bad, that’s what spammers do and legitimate email marketers should not hide domains behind privacy protection services. I still believe all of these things. What...
Anon whois information
I’ve talked before about reasons not to hide commercial domains behind whois proxies. Al found another one: if you use a proxies you cannot list your domains with abuse.net. Al has a good write up of whois, and why this is important. So go there and read it.
CAN SPAM ruling against whois privacy protection
A number of bloggers (Venkat B., John L. and Rebecca T.) have mentioned ZooBuh, Inc. v. Better Broadcasting, LLC (No.: 2:11cv00516-DN (D. Utah May 31, 2013)) recently. In summary of the case is that ZooBuh is an ISP that has sued Better Broadcasting for spamming in violation of CAN SPAM. Their case hinged on the receipt of more than 12,000 emails from Better Broadcasting, LLC. ZooBuh said these...
Transparency in sending
Al 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...