The Godaddy.com Spam Connection

Godaddy.com claims to be the "the world's No. 1 ICANN-accredited domain name registrar ..". This begs the question, "how can they make money and hardly charge anything for domain registration?" Perhaps being owner of WildWestDomains.com might be a clue, but perhaps just metaphorically.

Just the same, it is worth noting that one of the classic methods of running a website is to run it as a secondary domain (or subdomain). A good example is mail.yahoo.com. Yahoo.com, of course, is the classic web search index website. Mail.yahoo.com is the subdomain (or secondary domain) that specializes in email, via the web.

What may not be obvious to people is that you can use any name as a subdomain. It can even be a group of letters, that are meaningless; such as yip.yahoo.com. To add to this you can even have a subdomain such as, asdf.yahoo.com.

At this point you might wonder why this is even important. Well, as it happens, you can configure the webserver (serving the subdomain) to work with a wildcard.

To make it clear, here is an example:

Say you have xxx.com. This website has a standard "parked" webpage, and advertisement.

Say then that www.xxx.com does the same thing.

Then with the wildcard configuration xxx.xxx.com, yyy.xxx.com and asdf.xxx.com could all do the same thing, and that thing would be complete different from the first two websites.

This may not seem important except that THE SPAM CONNNECTION IS if you park a domain or perhaps use a "free DNS" service, you will never know about this until you try it out.

Why would you care about this?

Most spams that you receive are trying to sell you something. To have you make a purchase they need to have a webserver somewhere that consumates the transaction. On the web, it makes little difference what the name of the domain is, or subdomain for that matter.

Still not clear?

If you've bought something from ebay, you might have noticed that any credit card transaction does not happen on ebay. Usually it will be cash, or "paypal.com".

The point being, one website can show you the catalog, another can do the transaction. In the end, buy-a-rolex.xxx.com is no different than buy-a-rolex.com, except that you might own xxx.com and never know about this. And if you ever plan to use or sell the domain, you might find it has been blacklisted. In which case, your domain might be worthless.