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Comment by bharrison | Hacker News Reader

Think so?

"The public WHOIS would include an anonymized email address or a web form from which messages could be forwarded to the registrant email address."

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That's far better than the current system.

Atm I have to expose my email domain, which means some spammers just fire a broadside of this crap.

When it comes from an anonymized email forwarder, I can easily just redirect it into the spam folder.

What purpose does the Whois email serve if most people want to directly send it to their spam box? Seems like they should just scrap it.

Ideally it would be scrapped and replaced with something that doesn't invite every domain spammer out there.

What if there’s something illegal, violating copyright, etc. on the site? Or to take a less legal example, what if someone’s site is hacked? You need some way of getting in touch with the owners.

Contact the registrar or fill out the webform.

Atleast in my area websites are also required to carry legal contact information somewhere on the site, which is far easier to secure against spammers than the WHOIS database.

The snail-mail address of the registered agent would suffice. The cost of postage is sufficient to deter the least-determined spammers. And the most-determined spammers would be deterred by the most potentially profitable targets having legal departments handling the mail received by their registered agents.

Why not just set up your own email forwarder on such an address that you set up for all your domains?

So that would mean that I could not control rotation of that address anymore? That sounds bad ...

That's fine, you just route to /dev/null everything that goes to the anonymised address; the email headers either won't be re-written or will be re-written a la RFC 5321. Either way you'll be able to easily identify emails sent to the anon email address and dump them on the floor.

As well as any legitimate emails coming to you regarding your domain.

I don't think I ever received legitimate forms of coherent communication over my WHOIS emails.

> I don't think I ever received legitimate forms of coherent communication over my WHOIS emails.

Given that blog authors increasingly rely on Twitter for feedback (which I don’t use), I occasionally check whois to send notifications about dead links, rendering issues, etc.

I have - the WHOIS verification email!

https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/approved-with-specs-20...

Then you might as well just use an email address that you don’t use, and there is no difference between doing that in the future and doing so today.

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