Turning away spammers, scammers and others unwanted solicitors is an ongoing fight for all of us. One of the new tactics for eluding these intruders is private domain registration. Any domain registrar selling domains today typically offers this type of registration, including the registrar for Microsoft Office Live Small Business. If you’re not familiar with private domain registration, here’s how it works.

Say you browse to a domain registrar’s Web site and order the domain name fourthcoffee.com.  As part of the registration process, you are required to provide your name, e-mail address, phone number, and mailing address. The thing to understand is that all this personal contact info is made available on the Web in something called the WHOIS (as in “who is”) database.

Numerous Web sites will let you submit a domain name to the WHOIS server. The server will promptly return the domain owner’s e-mail address, phone number, and other contact details. It’s a useful service—and pesky marketers especially love it.

With private domain registration, however, the registrar substitutes alternative contact information for yours. Solicitors mining the WHOIS database will typically find your registrar’s contact info when they submit your domain name.

It’s important to know that you don’t surrender ownership of your domain just because your contact information is obscured. The registrar’s records will still record you as the owner and maintain your actual contact information.

Registrars charge a fee for this service. If you obtained your domain through Office Live Small Business, you pay $6.95 a year for private domain registration for any .com, .net or .org domain you own. To order it, sign in to your service and from the Home page, click Add/Manage Services, Web Site and E-mail, and then the sign up link next to Private Domain Registration. Because we think private domain registration is such a good idea, private registration is now included in the cost ($8.95 per year) for any additional new domains you purchase in the future.

Will private registration solve all your problems with solicitors? Probably not. But I know that if it keeps just two dinner-interrupting telemarketers from calling me each month, it will pay for itself.

See you online,

Skip Chilcott
Microsoft Office Live Small Business Team