Anti-spam policy

Spam victims, you will find our position on spam (unsolicited commercial e-mail) below, in addition to some ways in which you can confront spam-related problems.

1. Correctly identify the origin of the spam

Do you think that Gandi is responsible for the spam?

• The sender or the recipient of the spam has an address that ends in …@gandi.net: spammers often use fake names. Gandi does not spam, maintain a list of its customers for spammers, and does not sell such lists to third parties. These addresses in the “To” and “From” fields are simply faked, and definitely do not mean that Gandi created or sent the spam.
• By following one of the links in the spam you received, you came to an error page that says the domain name is registered by Gandi and uses our default servers.
• You see names such as redir-mail-telehouse1.gandi.net in the “Received” field of the spam, and think that Gandi has open relays: Gandi does not have open relays. We are very diligent about constantly checking this. If the Spam was relayed by one of our servers, this means it was sent by an e-mail address from a domain that uses one of our free forwarding services. Therefore, the mail of this domain was received by our servers and then relayed to the address specified by the owner of the domain.
• By looking up the domain name present in the mail, you see that the domain is registered with Gandi: As a registrar that is accredited by the authorities of each TLD (by ICANN for example), Gandi registers domain names for its customers. The use of a domain name purchased by us only depends on the person that owns it and/or its “contacts” (visible in the Whois). http://www.gandi.net/whois/). However, in some cases we can take direct action against the domain name.

2. What can I do to fight spam?

• You can file a complaint with the internet service provider or web host used by the spammer, in the hope that they might deactivate their e-mail account or website. We cannot take any action in this regard, but if you have difficulties in identifying the internet access provider or web host of the spammer, please feel free to contact us, we will do our best to help you identify them.
• Protect your e-mail address:
  If you have your own domain name, your contact information is found in the Whois database; your e-mail address is therefore also available via the Whois: it is a good idea to protect this address by enabling the anti-spam protection in your Account Management page (free service).
• Try to get the registrar to suspend the domain, notably if the Whois information of the domain is incorrect.
• Complain to the legal authorities

3. What more can Gandi do?

Gandi is only a technical intermediary in the registration of domain names. However, this does not mean that Gandi encourages or condones spam. It is quite the opposite. This only means that our position as a Registrar limits what we can and cannot do about it. We can only modify, suspend, or delete a domain if:

• The spam is sent via our forwarding service:
  such a practice hinders the smooth operation of our technical and general services by taxing our IT system and/or generating many complaints by third parties, and is grounds for the suspension or termination of forwarding services, or even the deletion of the domain name (Sections 14 and 19 of Gandi’s General Terms and Conditions of Domain Name Registration).
• Personal contact information in the Whois is invalid:
  As with any ICANN-accredited registrar, Gandi must assure that the information present in the Whois is valid. If you think that the information present in the Whois is incorrect for a domain name tied to spam that you have received, please contact us via our free Complaint for Inaccurate Whois page. If the information on the offending website is not updated within 15 days, the domain will be put on hold. If the contact information is clearly false, the domain will then be immediately put on hold (Sections 16 and 19 of Gandi’s General Terms and Conditions of Domain Name Registration)
• Gandi protects your e-mail address
  If you believe that the e-mail address being spammed has been obtained via the Whois directory, you may activate Gandi’s anti-spam system. This is a free, simple, and optional service: you will still get the spam, but they will be identified as such, and therefore easy to automatically send to your e-mails to the recycle bin if you are confident enough in our filter.