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Increasingly I am receiving a lot of cold calls, especially every time after purchasing a domain name, from companies across the globe offering website design or app development services.

The terms of service for any domain name require accurate and up-to-date contact details to be provided for the records held by the registry/registrar.

For the majority of our domain names, it is mandatory for the contact details to be published as part of the WHOIS record, and for some domain names the registries do not allow any kind of WHOIS privacy protection service or masking of details or the providing of fake details.

How are these companies getting notified every time I register a domain name? Are the registries/registrars selling information such as notifications like this to web development companies?

Due to the large number of domains in our portfolio it is cost prohibitive to use a privacy protection service on them all (this would more than double the total cost) and I'm not looking for a solution to prevent these sales calls (at least that's not the question I'm asking here).

I understand the information can be harvested from WHOIS records, however, I would like to know how they find out every time I register a new domain name as thats what prompts a new cycle of sales calls each time.

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  • Namecheap's whoisguard protection costs $2.88 /yr per domain, fair price, how much does your name registrar would charge to you for whois protection?
    – marcanuy
    Jun 24, 2016 at 14:04
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    One of the reasons we are not considering domain privacy services is that the official registrant of the domain typically becomes the company offering the privacy service licensing its use to the real owner, and Namecheap is a prime example company where this has been a problem in litigation. Ultimately due to the size of our company contact details are public record anyway so hiding them on WHOIS records doesn't offer sufficient benefit to justify the cost for the number of domains we have. I'm interested in understanding how companies around the world know when we register a new name.
    – richhallstoke
    Jun 24, 2016 at 16:23
  • ok yes, that is a totally different problem than the original question statement "this would more than double the total cost".
    – marcanuy
    Jun 24, 2016 at 17:28

2 Answers 2

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I have found out these companies obtain the information from websites such as:

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How are these companies getting notified every time I register a domain name? Are the registries/registrars selling information such as notifications like this to web development companies?

No, there are no notifications needed.

All gTLDs have to provide their zonefile for free, under some contractual obligations not to use it for spamming, etc. See the ICANN CZDS program: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/czds-2014-03-03-en

Zonefiles will contain all resolving domain names (a small % of them will either not have any nameservers or will be put on serverHold and hence won't appear in the zonefiles). They can be accessed once daily.

So easy to find new domains: download the file today, download it again tomorrow, and do the difference, you have the list of all new domains (and all deleted ones too)

You can then do whois queries and get contacts and spam them.

This is the most "efficient" way but not the only one.

Among others:

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