Why Am I Getting These Whois Verification Emails?

Have you received a Whois Verification email from us? You may be wondering why these emails are necessary and wondering why you received two different emails with similar requests for verification. These emails are a relatively new requirement from ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Names and Numbers, which oversees the Internet. This new requirement for Whois verification came into effect after we signed ICANN's 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA), which was around the end of last year.

After these emails began to go out, there was some confusion from customers. We recently updated both emails in an effort to clear up the confusion and hope that this post will also help. Here is a breakdown of the two types of Whois verification emails you now receive from us:

Account Info Whois Verification*

If you have any generic top-level domains (gTLDs) such as .COM or .NET in your account, this email will be sent to you whenever you make a change to your account information. What we mean by account information is the information that is under the "My Info" drop down and on the "Account Info" page. Any changes you make to your Organization, Name, Username, Email Address, Phone Number, or Address will trigger our system to send you an account information verification email.

For those accounts that do not have any gTLDs in them, this email will not be sent out to you when you make account information changes. This could be for a new account with no domains or it could be for an account that only has country code top-level domains (ccTLD) such as Germany's .DE or the UK's .CO.UK. ccTLDs are not a part of ICANN's new requirement for verification. If an account that has no gTLDs adds one or more gTLDs to it, the account holder will be required to verify their account information as soon as that gTLD is added. They will then also be required to re-verify when they make changes to their account information.

*This email was formerly called "Account Whois Accuracy Verification"

Contact Record Whois Verification*

Your contact record is the information that is used for the public Whois directory. As you may know, you can have multiple contact records in your account. These contact records can be used to assign different Whois information to different domains. Whenever you make a change to a contact record that is being used for a gTLD, our system will send out a contact record verification email. This email is similar to the one sent out asking for account information verification, but the verification will only affect a certain contact record (the contact record number will be specified in the email).

Any contact records that are unassigned to any domains or that are used only for ccTLDs will not need to be verified. However, once a contact record that has not yet been verified is assigned to a gTLD, our system will send out a contact record verification email. You can see which contact records are verified by going to the "Domains" drop down and clicking on "Contact Records" where you will see a column titled "gTLD Verified".

This email was formerly called "Whois Accuracy Verification"

Successful Verification

When verification is required, you will see notifications about it in your Dynadot account:


The first notification listed above is for verification of contact record C-1 (this contact record number will also be listed in the verification email). Below that is the notification for account info verification. If you receive both of these verification notifications and emails, you will need to click on each verification link in each email as they verify different things. Once you have successfully verified your account information and/or contact record(s), you will no longer see any notifications. Please note that failure to verify within 15 days will result in the suspension of your gTLDs.

Post by Robyn Norgan