New regulations and procedures as per ICANN’s 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement are now live. Here’s some important information you need to know:

Validating a registrant’s email address

  •  Effective immediately, the registrant contact needs to be validated upon the purchase or transfer of a domain name, or if the registrant’s first name, last name or email address have been modified. OpenSRS sends an email that, like our other features, has white-label/branding capabilities.
  • Reminder emails will be re-sent on days 5, 10 and 13 within the 15-day validation window; messages on days 10 and 13 of this process are sent to the Admin, Tech and Billing contacts as well. These reminders can be disabled.
  • The same process takes place if a WHOIS Data Reminder Policy (WDRP) notice, 30-day expiration notice or 5-day expiration notice bounce. It’s, therefore, crucial to ensure the WHOIS data your customer provides is correct.
  • Failing to receive a response within 15 days requires us to suspend the name. As a result, the name will be placed on ClientHold, rendering the domain name inactive.
  • This process applies to all gTLDs. There is no impact on existing names as long as they are not modified, and WDRP/expiration notices do not bounce.

As a result of these changes, we have introduced a number of features:

  • White label/branding capabilities for all registrant validation and reminder emails;
  • The ability to resend validation e-mails through the control panel and API (send_registrant_verification_email);
  • Additional information within a new API call regarding a name’s validation status (get_registrant_verification_status);
  • The ability to filter names by validation status in the new control panel;
  • The ability to send optional reminder e-mails 5, 10 and 13 days after the validation process is triggered.

You can also consult our registrant validation FAQ, located in our knowledge base.

Important: Increased data validation

The 2013 RAA requires registrars to ensure email addresses, postal addresses and phone numbers are formatted properly as per specific RFCs and ITU specifications. As a result, please ensure contact data sent is valid (for example, phone numbers formatted properly and postal/zip codes corresponding to the correct country) in order to avoid any ordering issues.