Network Solution DNS and email spam

Question

I recently moved one of my domains from freedns back to its registrar (netsol/worldnic) due to unexplained downtime of freedns servers.

But since then I have witnesses a huge increase in email spam.

I always had a fair deal of spam on that domain but since having moved from worldnic to freedns the first time around it had died down over time. but now it is back to its initial levels.

Is there something in freedns that somehow protects one from spam? or/and is there something fishy about worldnic DNS? (like do spammers use them in some way to build a database of domains to spam?) or would it be, tongue in cheek netsol spamming me on purpose to have me buy some spam protection plan/mail hosting or something to that effect? :)

Should I move back to freedns? I cannot afford to actually pay for DNS and I also cannot afford much downtime for that domain (no more than an hour or so)

Answer 1

If you haven't changed anything in your mail configuration, it is probably just a coincidence. Spam is noted to come in waves - in hand with security holes the distribution of malware/botnets exploiting them. I'd advise just building a filter yourself or using a free filtering service like spamfence if it is just for a few mail addresses in your private use.

Answer 2

Couple of points here:

• I'm assuming freedns was also your registrar (i.e. you transferred the domain, not just changed the nameserver records), and if so, they may have provided you with "private" WHOIS records where the contact's email addresses are masked; the spammers could be scraping your email address off your WHOIS record.

• Like anti-virus, some form of anti-spam should always be used: you just can't get away without it anymore.

• consider moving to Google Apps (and transferring your domain to them via GoDaddy): you get free anti-spam with yourdomain.com enabled gmail mailbox, but GoDaddy provides basic DNS support so you can create whatever records you need for your domain; you essentially get full control over the zone from a Web GUI at no extra charge (there's "advanced" DNS services but I'm not sure what the difference is to be honest; I've never needed anything outside of that).