Cold calls after registration

Do I blame my registrar?

[dingman]

This morning before I headed in to work, I got a cold call from someone afilliated with Earthlink, trying to sell me hosting for a domain I registered about a week and a half ago. The name of my registrar was dropped, but in such a way that I'm unsure whether they in fact have any relationship with eachother or not. They obviously hadn't done their homework, since the domain was up and running as soon as the registration went through, and they knew about mynewdomain.net but were oblivious to the fact that I registered mynewdomain.com or that I own several other domains.

This hasn't happened with any of my previous registrations, but I do wonder about how they found out about this new registration. Should I blame my registrar and think about switching, or are there other ways people find out about recent registrations?

[DaveN]

Ring the registrar and let them know what is happening.

DaveN

[Lisa]

If it was Verisign I would say yes, Since I have witnessed this. The smaller the registrar the less likely they gave out your number.

But in reality, getting this information is not hard. Lots of people monitor new registrations. :)

[dingman]

Not Verisign - I've yet to come up with a reason to pay more for all the hassle I've heard comes with a Verisign registration :)

I'll drop my registrar a line letting them know that it happened, but if there are ways people can monitor for new registrations, I'll just assume that my registrar is following their posted privacy policy. I do get astonishingly little spam (as in none) at the e-mail addresses they know about, so they must be doing something right.

[obsrvr1]

I would have to say a definite yes. Within a week of registering just one domain I have been bombarded with faxes and mass mailings. Though most of the faxes advertise cell phone plans and vacation packages, today's postcard was indeed from Earthlink.

For private use I probably would have refrained from registering my numbers, however in the business world it is nearly impossible to survive in a vacuum and profit.