Today I received an email from a seller of a domain name very similar to mine asking if I wanted to buy his domain name. I'm very new to domain names and was wondering how he got my email address. I've only had this particular domain that was similar to his for less than a week. The email was sent to "info@[mydomainname].com" and CC'd to my email address that I used to register the domain. Is it possible just to put the "info@" part before the domain name and send an email to any domain name owner? Or might he have just used Whois, even though I would have thought he'd contact me on my personal email rather than the "info@[mydomainname].com" one. And is it co-incidence or how did he know that I might be interested in his domain so soon after I registered mine? Thoughts?
No, I haven't posted anything relating to the domains that I own and the email address is a brand new one I used when signing up for the domain hosting service.
Not coincidence. He can get your email by searching whois. First you need to do is verify that the seller really own the domain to prevent scam.
Well,just as mentos said,maybe the guy got your information via whois information. If you do not want to let your domain information shown to others,you can apply privacy protection.
You can put anything in front of @domainname and it will be received or rejected by the sites default mailbox depending on how the mail system is set up in the control panel. The setup options include: bounce undirected mail blackhole undirected mail forward undirected mail It sounds like yours is set up to forward all undirected mail to your mailbox.
When buying domain names unless you apply "whois protection" (namecheap offer this free) he'll be able to find all your details from whois as said above (whois.net) or he may of just guessed (i.e. ive sent emails to before by just putting and generally it gets there. Id pay alot of money for one of my competitors domain if it was offered to me though as each case is different only you will know if its worth getting or not.