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About Verification of Contact Information

There are several reasons that your registrar (or reseller) has to contact you to verify your contact information. Some of the most common are:

  • Whois inaccuracy complaint – The Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) requires that registrars take reasonable steps to investigate and correct inaccurate Whois data. This can include contacting you to request verification of your identity and contact information.
  • 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) – The Whois Accuracy Program Specification of the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) requires registrars to validate and verify certain Whois data fields, which may include contacting you by phone, email or postal mail. Registrars must suspend or delete domain names that are not timely verified.
  • Whois Data Reminder Policy (WDRP) – ICANN requires all ICANN-accredited Registrars to formally remind their customers once a year to review and update the contact information for their domain name. Read more at ICANN's WDRP FAQs For Domain Name Registrants.
  • Financial transactions – Registrars may contact you to verify your identity or contact information as needed to process payments.
  • Domain transfer matters – Registrars may request verification of contact information only when there is a reasonable dispute regarding the identity of the Registered Name Holder (or the Administrative Contact) of a domain name regarding an FOA, or the identity of the Registered Name Holder regarding an Auth-Code.
Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."