Planning to register a domain primarly for my own personal email, should I hand out my real information? reddit / selfhosted ---------------------------------------------------------------------- etay080 · 2023-10-29 18:56 I’m planning to buy a domain so I’d be able to have control over my email providers and not sure whether or not I should put my real information in the registrant’s site. I know it’s an ICANN violation not to and I’m going to use porkbun which has free whois privacy either way but some people seem to recommend providing false infromation either way since the info could still be exposed through UDRP claims, though I find it highly unlikely that I’ll ever annoy anyone enough to make him pay $1330 to expose my information. Sounds like providing false information would put my domain at extreme risk especially if I plan to use it for my main, personal email address and could lose it at any time for providing false information. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- thekrautboy · 2023-10-29 19:04 Most registrars offer a "privacy" option when you register a domain, this keeps you as the legal owner but your personal information will not be visible in public databases. Instead the registrar places a "dummy info" into those fields. Sometimes this option costs extra, sometimes its free. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jusepal · 2023-10-29 19:09 All registar have some randomize kyc in place. It might kick in at the moment of registration, you reg and can't provide legit id that tally with the fake details you originally provided and the domain will be auto suspended. It might randomly kick in next month or next year, same, you can't provide id and domain suspended. In rare cases when registrar goes busted, icann will appoint another registrar to automatically absorb all the old registrar customer. The new registrar might have different kyc practice, they asked for your id to prove ownership since you're a new customer to them, same, you can't provide id and domain suspended. If your email is that important, just don't. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- tech2but1 · 2023-10-29 19:15 > some people seem to recommend providing false infromation I wouldn't, if you need to verify anything in the future for any reason then you're not going to be able to. If you're not bothered about losing the domain then fine but it sounds like losing the domain might defeat the point of this exercise altogether. This is the problem with the internet, someone comes up with some outrageous edge case or bizarre reason to do/not do something and suddenly it's parroted everywhere as a requirement. I can tell you I have hundreds of domains with my name on them (some business so public info, and some private) and have never had any issues with any "claims". ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PaulEngineer-89 · 2023-10-29 20:41 I don’t recommend using your email address directly with mist contacts and here is why. Say one gives your email address to an adware site. Now you are permanently stuck with spam. If you give every contact an email that is unique to them and them alone it makes it impossible to associate your email with an advertising profile and if someone puts you on an Ad network you will know who did it and you can just delete the email identity. So if you register on duck, duck, go, they give you a “Duck iD”. By itself it just forwards to your email. You can also do plus addresses but what I prefer is totally random usernames. There are others but DDG is free and unlimited. Since that’s the case there is no reason to move your email at all if you don’t want to. You can do the same thing with Cloudflare (forward all emails to my- domain.com to xxx mailbox) but it reveals your actual domain. When you sign up you are required to use your real name/address. Mist domain registrars just register under their name so you aren’t visible in the Whois database as part of the service.