1and1.com offers whois privacy free with domain registration:
"Register your domain with confidential contact data, so your personal information stays private."

If I decide to transfer my domain to another registrar in the future, will having the contact data be confidential cause problems? Or could 1and1.com even use this as a tactic to block the transfer to another registrar?

You just need to remove the whois protection before you transfer the name away

well, is it really required cause in namecheap all emails sent to that WHOISGUARD Email ID is forwarded to the email addy you want so, it shouldn't be a problem.

It is always best to remove whois protection BEFORE transferring anyway

Originally posted by dmaven
It is always best to remove whois protection BEFORE transferring anyway

hmm... ok.

its better to avoid the complications ;)

Originally posted by darshanjog
hmm... ok.

its better to avoid the complications ;)

A little bit of effort but it may remove a headeache later

Originally posted by dmaven
A little bit of effort but it may remove a headeache later

Agreed to that already in the earlier post :)

It depends on the options in your privacy protection. If you turn off privacy protection spammers can harvest your address. Probably not many in that brief interval, but it has happened.
Namecheap Whoisguard will forward all emails. To prevent spam there are options to generate new Whoisguard address and to do this periodically. If you are going to make a transfer I recommend turning off the option to generate a new Whoisguard address.
Godaddy's Domains-by-Proxy has three forwarding options: Forward all, forward spam-filtered, and forward none. You should probably select forward all if you are about to make a transfer. When you do this you may find spam pouring in, although if you don't reply to it they don't have your real address, so it should stop when either your Domainsbyproxy account ends or when you change the options back to blocking it. The Domainsbyproxy login is different from your Godaddy account login. Your Godaddy account will have a link to manage privacy options, but that will still take you to a request for your Domainsbyproxy login before you can do anything with it.

Originally posted by kreativ
If I decide to transfer my domain to another registrar in the future, will having the contact data be confidential cause problems? Or could 1and1.com even use this as a tactic to block the transfer to another registrar?

From what I gather, it does. As dmaven said, you best turn it off
prior to transferring out.

Whether any registrar can use that as a tactic or not is not really
a "legal" problem but a technical one. Given the amount of spam
their privacy services receive, it's really hard to tell what's legit or
not.

On the other hand, registrars should post this potential drawback
in their fine prints.

To transfer a domain to Godaddy you will have to respond to an email Godaddy will send to the Whois-displayed email address. I think that this is their own policy to decrease chance of a domain getting hijacked to them and having to deal with the kind of mess that results. Privacy protection should not interfere as long as the option you have with your privacy protection service will forward it. If your privacy protection is set to spam-filtered forwarding, it may or may not work. Yahoo has sometimes sent perfectly valid Godaddy account information emails to my Bulk folder, but I read those anyway.

Thanks for the feedback. Sounds like I'll need to find out how exactly 1and1.com chooses to handle transfers when the whois info is private. Their fine print already states private domain names can't be transferred, so it would depend on whether you could turn the privacy feature off just before doing the transfer.

Originally posted by darshanjog
well, is it really required cause in namecheap all emails sent to that WHOISGUARD Email ID is forwarded to the email addy you want so, it shouldn't be a problem.
so the owner can still be contacted even if a whois guard is in place?

Originally posted by iowaguy1
so the owner can still be contacted even if a whois guard is in place?

What do you mean ?

darshanjog said that, "all emails sent to that WHOISGUARD Email ID is forwarded to the email addy you want".

I think that means even with a whoisguard, the domain owner can still be contacted.

Sounds like that defeats the purpose of whoisguard if you can still get spammed.

Originally posted by iowaguy1
darshanjog said that, "all emails sent to that WHOISGUARD Email ID is forwarded to the email addy you want".

I think that means even with a whoisguard, the domain owner can still be contacted.

Sounds like that defeats the purpose of whoisguard if you can still get spammed.

You can always set WHOISGUARD to change the email addy every 1 day or so.

That way you can't be spammed that easily.

Originally posted by iowaguy1
darshanjog said that, "all emails sent to that WHOISGUARD Email ID is forwarded to the email addy you want".

I think that means even with a whoisguard, the domain owner can still be contacted.

Sounds like that defeats the purpose of whoisguard if you can still get spammed.

Yes, eventually the Whoisguard address will get harvested by spammers, and the spam will get forwarded. Namecheap's available solution to this is to go into your options and generate a new Whoisguard address. That new address will get displayed in the updated whois, and the old address will become obsolete. Being obsolete means that it will no longer forward. You can select an option to have Whoisguard generate new addresses periodically. Once a week is probably plenty. By the time the spammer harvests it, sets up a list, and sends out a spam run, it will probably already be changed, in which case it will fail to forward. If you are planning to transfer a domain, it is probably best to deselect generating new addresses, just to prevent the address getting changed in the interval between it being posted to the whois that the new prospective registrar collects it from, and the confirmation request email being sent.

thanks for the very enlightening information!