There was a hum on the line when I picked up the phone, and I knew what was coming: one of those recorded telemarketing pitches. I'd had them before, but I'd never had one quite like this. It was advising me to transfer my domains to a cheaper registrar, namely BulkRegister.

I loathe direct marketing. It doesn't matter whether it's spam mail, paper mail, or phone calls. I hate it in all its forms.

This call came a few years ago, but it was a sign that the age of domain-dipping registrar marketing had begun. Marketers were grabbing contact information from domains and using it to target advertising that would be of interest. BulkRegister was the only company I know of that flirted with direct telephone marketing, and it didn't last long. Barely a month goes by now, however, without letters arriving at my office that look like domain renewal notices but are actually domain transfer requests to an opportunistic marketer called the Domain Registry of America. And as for spam e-mail, I can't tell you how many low-rent Web developers hawk their services to the e-mail address I use for domain registration.

I loathe direct marketing. It doesn't matter whether it's spam mail, paper mail, or phone calls: I hate it in all its forms. So, the notion that doing something I feel I need to do--own and operate domains--opens me to targeted advertising really stuck in my craw. But until quite recently, it seemed there was no way around the problem.

Avoiding unwanted mail
Here's the conundrum: If you're going to register a domain, you must use a real name, address, phone number, and e-mail address to do it. The rules are adamant. In fact, if you knowingly provide false contact information on these records, you can theoretically have your name confiscated (though as far as I know, that's never been done). All of the contact information goes into a domain record, which networking geeks--at the dawn of the Net--called Whois after an old Unix command. The bigger problem is that the Whois database is publicly accessible. Anybody can type in the name of a domain at a domain registrar or lookup site, such as Whois.net or BetterWhois.com, and get contact information for the domain holder.

So what's a privacy-loving, domain-getting, ad-hating individual to do?

Who's your daddy?
Enter a simple but elegant solution from GoDaddy, an accredited registrar with an attitude and a reputation for being a friend to the little guy, partly by casting the monolithic Network Solutions as the Enemy of the People. (My favorite quotation from Bob Parsons, president of GoDaddy: "[Network Solutions] has been taking advantage of the uninformed business owner for years.") After spearheading a price-slashing discount program that lowered the bar to less than $10 per year per domain, GoDaddy hit upon a scheme for bypassing the registration process: it acts as your proxy. GoDaddy has set up a company, Domains by Proxy, that appears as the owner and administrator of the domain in question. An e-mail address of your domain name @domainsbyproxy.com appears in the contact field so that legitimate e-mail can be handled properly, but in all other respects, the contact information is designed to keep unwanted callers at bay.

GoDaddy has set up a company, Domains by Proxy, that appears as the owner and administrator of the domain in question.

Here's how it works: You sign up for a new domain at GoDaddy or transfer an old domain from another registrar to GoDaddy. You then pay it a fee to go private. (The standard price is $12, but the service is running at a discounted price of $9 at the moment.) GoDaddy knows you own the domain--it explicitly makes no claim on your domain--but its contact information appears on the Whois. Anonymity can be abused, of course, so if GoDaddy customers use it as a way to break any laws, they shouldn't assume they're in the clear: GoDaddy's records could be subject to subpoena in the case of egregious lawbreaking.

Catalog.com, too
Like any good idea, of course, Domains by Proxy has its imitators. Catalog.com, for example, now has a similar feature called Domain Privacy, which comes at $9.95 over the price of domain registration. The total price tag for a private domain with Catalog.com was $44.95 for a year, with Web hosting thrown into the bargain.

During a weeklong test of both domain privacy services, there's little to choose between the two. Catalog.com has a single generic e-mail address for its domain administrator contact information, which may make important e-mail messages harder to process. But other than that, the two services provide a nice layer of insulation against the harsh wind of targeted marketing. And for that, I salute them both.

Direct marketers got you down? Share your pain with Matt Lake in the TalkBack below.