ICANN Verifications

ICANN stands for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.  They are the body that oversees the Domain Name Registration System.

Lately, ICANN is cracking down on contact information associated with Domain Name Registration.  Once a year or so, your registrar will send out an ICANN Verification e-mail, listing the contact info associated with your registration.  The e-mail should contain a link on which you are supposed to click to verify the contact info is correct.


Now, many of these verification e-mails end up in spam folders.  Sometimes folks read the e-mail, and because the data is correct, they delete it and go on with their day.  A few years ago, there was no issue with failing to respond to these e-mails.  However, sometime last year, ICANN began suspending domains if these verification e-mails are not responded to.  This means that when you type in www.yourdomain.com, instead of bringing up your website, it will bring up an error page or no page at all.

As you probably know, there are several contacts associated with your domain: Owner (or registrant,) Technical, and Administrative.  Some registrars add a billing contact to your registration information. I have spent my whole tech career teaching clients they should ALWAYS list themselves as the owner of the domain.  The technical contact is generally the hosting provider.  I suggest my clients list me as the Administrative contact IF they want me to administer their domain name in any way.  But the reason to list oneself as owner is so that some tech contractor cannot hold a domain "hostage" should the client decide to vote with his feet.  By listing me as an admin contact, I can renew a domain, change the DNS, and have about all the control of it I need to be able to serve my customer.  Sometimes, this means I can handle domain verifications for them.  Sometimes, but not always.

I say this because sometimes these verifications go out to the admin contact listed on the domain; other times, they go to whomever is listed as owner.  These days, it seems as if they most often go our to the registrant contact, at the e-mail listed in the domain name registration.  Often, the owner has listed an e-mail associated with that very domain.

Well, once your domain is suspended, your DNS will not resolve, which means e-mail accounts associated with the domain no longer work.  That means you do not receive the e-mail sent to that address that you need to click on to verify the domain info, putting you into a loop which becomes a real PITA to try to solve.

ICANN has extended this process.  Today, I registered a new domain, and my registration was not complete until I clicked on an ICANN verification e-mail to verify the contact information for the new domain.  That e-mail, of course, went straight to my spam folder.  They will likewise be sending verification e-mails any time contact info is updated or changed in any way. If you fail to respond, your domain name will not work.

So what is your bottom line as a domain name owner? You cannot ignore any ICANN verification e-mails.  If you do, your domain name registration will be suspended.  And you must learn to distinguish the legit verification e-mails from those phishing and scam domain-related e-mails.  You will need to keep an eye out for these e-mails.  Your IT Person or Webmaster may not receive a copy.

If you are unsure of if a verification e-mail is legit, you can forward it to your own Webmaster or Computer Guru.  If one of my people forwards me one of these, I do the verification for them and verify it is legit.  Your own person should do the same for you at no additional charge.  If you do not have "a person," you can log into your account at your domain name registrar.  Most will have a "resend verification" link on the domain's control panel if verification is pending, or if a domain has been suspended fir non-verification.  If you do not know who your domain's registrar is, you can get this information from a Whois search.

For everything you need to know about verification, visit ICANN's page at https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/contact-verification-2013-05-03-en .  Bit if you don't want to read all of that, (and I can't say I blame you,) just remember you can no longer ignore those verification e-mails.  If you do, you will end up with a domain name that does not resolve.