If you own a domain name, sooner or later you may find yourself at the receiving end of various offers or scams, or find your domain is being used to send spam. Here are a couple of issues to watch out for:
- you receive an email telling you that you should register your domain as an Internet keyword, to protect your name and trademark
- you start receiving bounced emails and replies to emails that seem to have come from your domain name, but you haven't sent them.
Registering Internet keywords
This one is a scam - there's no such thing as Internet keywords you can register, not in the same way as domain names or trademarks anyway. This is not to be confused with Google Adwords, where you can pay to have your website come up on Google search results when users type in specified keywords.
Here's an example of a typical email, sent with the title "Domain name & Internet keyword":
We are Hong Kong Network Service Company Limited which is the domain name register center in Asia. We received a formal application from a company who is applying to register “(yourdomainname)” as their domain name and Internet keyword. Since after our investigation we found that this word has been in use by your company, and this may involve your company name or trade mark, so we inform you in no time. If you consider these domain names and internet keyword are important to you and it is necessary to protect them by registering them first, contact us soon.
The company that sent the email sells domain names and search engine marketing (SEO) services. What they're probably hoping is that you get panicked into buying domains in other countries (supposedly to protect your brand) and maybe they can sell you some SEO services while they're at it.
If you receive an email like that, DON'T reply or click on the link to their website (that just helps them verify your email address). Just delete the email. If you really want to register domains in other countries, you can do that via a known domain name reseller. If you want to register an international trademark, do that via a registered authority (see ipAustralia for advice).
Spammers using your domain name
The second point refers to spammers who use a legitimate domain name (maybe yours!) as the return address when they send their emails. They just make up email addresses, such as "johnsmith@yourdomain.com" and set it up so the email appears to come from that account. Why? Because an email from a genuine domain has a better chance of making it through spam filters.
This practice is commonly known as spoofing. The first you usually know of this is when you start receiving bounced messages(undeliverable mail) or auto-generated replies from company spam filters. It doesn't mean anyone has hacked in to your website or set up an email account, just that a spammer is using an email address that ends with your domain, so they sound authentic. In fact it isn't a security problem, but it can be very annoying if you get hundreds of rejected emails in your inbox.
So how can you stop the domain name spoofing? Well you can't really, but you can minimise the effects. If your email hosting includes a "catchall" address, the rejected replies will be sent to that. A "catchall" is an email address that catches all email sent to your domain that isn't directed to a specific account, and forwards it to a nominated email address. It can be very useful to capture mis-spelt or mis-typed email addresses, but it also means you'll receive any mail sent to made-up addresses. If you are annoyed by these messages, disable the catch-all, and set up a few email aliases to catch mis-spelt addresses. You can do this via your email hosting account (ask your web hosting provider if you need help).
Another way to reduce the annoyance factor is to set up a rule in your email program to filter the messages, and redirect them to your junk or spam folder. For example, see setting up rules in Outlook. However, you'll find the messages will stop after a while anyway, as the spammer moves on to use other domains. Ah, the joys of the Internet!