In the last few days I have been receiving several emails from "web's biggest directory" (www-goto.com) asking the domain owner to "update" their "free" listing. Several of our customers have also received these emails and asked us about them.

Just wanted to forewarn everyone, because I am pretty sure these are unsolicited emails and they are a little tricky for novice web site owners. They draw the person in on the first page to "update the listing" and then a series of questionable "options" appear on the next steps. One is a subscription to some sort of list, and the rest are all some type of paid services. I attempted this on one of my domains to test it, rejecting to select any list subscription or paid service. I then received another email reply stating my "listing has been updated" but please click the "update ok" link to proceed.

I am quite wary of the "update ok" link and am almost certain this type of thing would subscribe the domain owner to somethig they don't want. So forewarn your customers/domain owners.

Traceroute on www-goto.com (which is not the same as goto.com) shows DNS of 202.14.69.2. 202.14.69.2 is registered with APNIC:

inetnum: 202.14.69.0 - 202.14.69.255
netname: MADGENSITES
descr: Madgen Solutions Pvt. Ltd. provides collocation services, shared
descr: hosting services, private servers hosting, mailing solutions and
descr: mailservers and is located in Malviya Nagar, New Delhi, India
country: IN
admin-c: HM339-AP
tech-c: HM339-AP
remarks: send all spam and abuse reports to abuse@madgen.com

Same here. been getting a lot of unsolicited mail also from them. Major pain.

Traceroute shows they're still at 202.14.69.2 hosted by madgen.com.
Since that is obviously an unscrupulous host, you may want to include complaint to their upstream estelcom.com

I have been getting tons of "update your listing" mails from different so called webdirectories, this is spam and should be ignored.

Every domain I registered and added on my server has been receiving junk from goto directory for almost a year now !!

Im not sure how they are harvesting the e-mails or the data, because they seem to be including genuine headers and meta information from other search companies, but are sending the 'renewals' out to generic e-mail addresses.

I've found headers and meta information in the e-mails from them which is identical with info I have given on genuine search engines, but the e-mails are the problem, which usually always are addressed to info@yourdomain .

Obviously the way to reduce such spam is NOT to use a 'catch-all' system for your mailbox, but use named mail accounts instead, and then set your mail to bounce everything that is not sent to a named account. When naming your accounts, try NOT to use the common generic terms like info, sales, webmaster, customerservice, etc ., but use less obvious terms.

I have found that this reduces spam !!

My whois data is privacy protected. I do not receive these spams.

When I had combined registry and hosting through Yahoo every domain had a core address of admin@domainname which forwarded to the Yahoo address. You could create and destroy other addresses, but admin was not disposible. So if a spammer decided to use admin, there was no getting away from the spam. Yahoo would normally put it into the Bulk folder, but it would never be a spam-free account again.