I recently added a hosting account with a free domain at HMS. I just got a spam email stating:



what gives?

Most likely this company is doing blind searches on new domains registered and sending Spam To those accounts. I have gotten spam after registering a domain name before as well. Since domain name registration information is public domain and available to all via a simple whois search any one can view the information.

Hostmysite will never and has never sold your email addresses to anyone.

Hello,

It appears that '2BuckWebs' whoever they are must be doing whois lookups. This is actually a fairly common tactic by spammers looking to gather new email addresses.

HostMySite hates spam. I personally hate spam. We wouldn't distribute your name or contact info for any reasons. To prevent against bulk email, we do many things including spam filtering for inbound and outbound mail. In your webmail login as root@yourdomain.tld you can choose Settings, Email Accounts, Domain Spam Filtering to customize your filtering so it becomes more or less agressive. If you need help optimizing this, please feel free to contact us or post in the email forum.

Be careful when looking at your personal SNAIL mail as well. Some unscrupulous companies will send you what looks like a bill stating that you need to re-registr your domain because it's about to expire. MANY people get duped into sending in the $10 or so bucks and then they find out that what they have actually done is transferred their domain to some flaky fly-by-night domain parking service for the next year or so. Make sure you know when your domains will expire and only deal with the company you registered the domain with or who YOU want to transfer it to.

alright. Thanks for the info. I didn't think HMS would do anything like sell the info. **** spammers. Oh and I have already received those infamous letters in the mail about "registering".....what a bunch of crap.

thanks!

I would surely think that HostMySite wouldn't send you out spam for other hosting companies! lol... I have a catch all email setup and I get lots of spam emails to some of the generic names like sales, info, mail... Of course I just use SmarterMail's content filtering to block those .

We're actually looking to provide private domain registrations sometime in the near future, which would allow you to setup new domains under a concealed name and address - the aim for which is to prevent just this type of 'whois abuse'. Once this feature is released it will be advertised both here in the forums and on our main site.

No ETA on it as of yet though - I'll push for it to be sooner rather than later though.