Does having your personal address in WHOIS mean lots of letter mail?

[MrSavage]

I've got a bit of a new situation and I would be grateful to know what it's like currently.

I have a pretty wide collection of domains which up until now, have been private. I am strongly considering saving money on privacy and just dealing with the consequences. However, I'm curious to know if there will be scam/spam snail mail letters showing up in my mail box. I know this happens with trademarks (public addresses listed).

I don't find Google searches very helpful in finding out what it's like out there right now regarding this issue. Any sort of insight would be greatly appreciated!

[not2easy]

Actual businesses? I have only received American Express Card solicitations and only on one domain. Bogus snail mail? A few billing attempts for unsolicited services that try to appear as invoices for services.

[LifeinAsia]

A few billing attempts for unsolicited services that try to appear as invoices for services.

I've gotten a few of those "invoices" trying to trick me into "renewing" my domain names with them. At 3-4 times the going rate. I guess they assume that the IT people aren't going to deal with snail mail and an unsuspecting secretary or business office person will think the invoice is legit and pay it.

[not2easy]

Yes, that's what it looks like to me as well. Even then you'd think someone who knows better would need to sign off on it?

[bill]

I had hundreds of domains showing my physical mailing address for years. I got the occasional 419 scam mails and a few scammy "domain renewal" notices but not enough to be a bother. After adding privacy to the address I don't see much change.

It's the e-mail addresses that I used during that period that are spam buckets. However at least it's targeted domain scam spam. All those fears I used to have about putting an e-mail address into visible WHOIS never really panned out. I thought more average spammers would harvest those and put them on every spam list known to man. That doesn't seem to be the case.

[MrSavage]

Thank you so much everyone for the insight. This is great news and I can move ahead without too many worries at least from a spam/junk snail mail letter perspective!

[keyplyr]

Besides the fraudulant domain renew letter mentioned above, I've never received any other snail mail and I've had several non-private TLDs registered for almost 20 years.

[bill]

<added>
However, another factor might be that I'm in Japan. Few scammers from abroad are going to spend the money to actually deliver me a snail mail. It would probably be cost prohibitive. Therefore I may not be the best example in this bunch.

[RedBar]

22+ years and hardly any snail mail correspondence other than a very few obvious scammers.

The only strange email I get maybe once a month emanates from China and tell me that such-and-such a business has applied for example.cn to be registered and upon research they find it is my business name and then ask me if I have any objections to them registering example.cn.

Why strange? I already own the name they are referring to!

[mack]

I get some snail mail, generally around about renewal time from hosts I do not use reminding me to pay them my renewal fee. They are even kind enough to give me login details for their website so I can just login and pay them.

No doubt they then transfer the domain to them.

I have noticed a large increase in the number of cold calls from development companies right after registration offering their services.

Mack.