ICANN, the governing body for domain name registration, has modified the RAA (Registrar Accreditation Agreement) for 2014, requiring all registrars to now verify email addresses whenever contact information changes or a domain is registered or transfered.
This means whenever you change a domain’s WHOIS contact email address info, you need to be looking for a “RAA email verification” email to be sent to the new email address, and click the link it contains or you domain will be deactivated within 15 days.
This also applies to the domain consolidation we’ve been doing for the past year–suddenly this requirement being imposed means with every transfer we do to our new primary registrar the contact information must be verified. We urge you to check your contact information now and make sure it is accurate, to avoid any unwanted domain suspensions.
We have already seen a significant number of clients who think these “RAA email verification” messages are spam and either ignore them or report them as spam. In both cases this is a really, really bad idea as your domain will get suspended if you do not verify your email address!
The email verification requirements are documented in the “WHOIS ACCURACY PROGRAM SPECIFICATION” section of the new RAA which can be found in its entirety here on ICANN’s website:
http://www.icann.org/en/resources/registrars/raa/approved-with-specs-27jun13-en.htm