Wild West Domains is a reseller platform that is operated by Godaddy

Checking the whois we see

Same Nameservers

Essentially the same address

Same phone number.

register.com and NetSol are both huge and I believe eNom is pretty large also. These three being included makes me ask the question what percentage of all domains are registered through these 10 services? 83% sounds high but if 83%+ of all domains are registered through these services it's not that they are really doing any worse than the industry as a whole. Would I like to see them drop spammers? Well yes. Do I think they are more incompetent because I saw their name on this list? Not really.

IP Address would be useful, then we could block those mail servers directly!!!

grow up!

FAIL! these are Registrars not Spammers! read the article again.. its thier customers who are the spammers! they also have a very large number of legitimate customers. as for IP's these can be anything its the domain name that is registered not the IP! IP's can be changed at the drop of a hat. If YOU want IP's do a lookup! if you cant do that you dont deserve to be incharge of any IT equipment at all.

Anonymous, relax my brother!

Everyone who frequents El Reg knows that you have an opinion on EVERY SINGLE TOPIC that appears here, but there's no need to be nasty to other users.

Yeah,

M

There are no IP addresses. Spammers set up web, mail, and DNS hosting on bot networks. The one piece needed to tie that dynamic swarm of machines together as a web site is a domain name. XinNet, eNom, and GoDaddy resellers are commonly used because they'll rapidly create a domain without verifying ownership. That means the bots can generate domain names too, and the whole process is nearly untraceable to the actual criminals.

are these not companies that sell domains, so therefore they would want to sell.

Its not for them to decide how peoiple use them, its like Ford selling a car and it being used to ram a shop to break in, Ford couldn't care less, they've made their £0.20p

The registrars are not getting in trouble for their customers' spamming. They're getting in trouble because the domains are registered with false identities. That's what violates ICANN rules and enables easy criminal use. XinNet has an incredible number of customers named "asdf asdf."

I hear people have been taking my name in vain!

Stop it.

I am a very successful web entrepreneur, I have 1000's of domains registered, my companies serve the entire world.

[Pssst, you want pills?]

It doesn't surprise me to find eNom at #2 on that list.

"Reunion.com" (hosted by eNom) has been constantly spamming me for months & trying to get them to stop has gotten me nowhere.

So I finally set up a Message Rule to auto-forward *everything* from *any* eNom hosted server, straight to their up-stream provider's abuse, legal, and domain address'.

No more "Someone is looking for you", no more Web-Cam invites, & a *LOT* of my previous volume of spam has dropped considerably.

(Well, what I actually SEE of it has dropped - everything from eNom is being bounced & deleted unread, which works well-enough, too.)

Either eNom's up-stream provider will get sick & tired of getting spammed by eNom hosted domains & cut them off, or they'll set up their own Message Rule to auto-dump MY emails.

Either way, it's no longer my problem.

May all the companies on that list die a horrible, grisly, agonizing death in a stew of their own internal organs.

(Extremely rude gesture towards them all.)

is it me or does the main bulk of those 10 = the top domain registrars anyway?

It's pretty simple.

Ban domain "tasting" - that's the practice of being able to setup a domain and not have to pay for it until 7-28 days have passed.

The most prolific bot-registered domains are setup with no intention of ever paying, they just use the registration for a few days until it's shut down.

From a spamfighting point of view: GoDaddy and Netsol are among the least responsive to complaints about fake registrations and it took a concerted effort 5 years ago by a lot of people to even get ICANN to think about enforcing registration rules. At one point ICANN's proposed solution to fake data in registrations was to make it allowable.

There are bad apple registrars and there are bad apples in ICANN who are effectively allowing it to happen. Once the money gets really followed, it will be interesting to see who's paying off whom.