Who Shares Your Address
Or: How to find other domainers in your home town
Like many domain owners I use a PO Box (in a UPS store in my case) as a whois address. While it’s not particularly hard to locate me, I do this for a number of reasons. For one, I do not want my home address listed everywhere. Another reason is that I may not always be home, but may still need access to my mail. If your PO Box is in a store and you have been a customer for a while, you can usually ask them for
Ultimately I would love to get even closer to being “paperless” and use a service like Earth Class Mail that scans your mails and can even deposit checks for you, but I have yet to find something like that in Canada – anyways, back on topic.
Yesterday I attended one of the startup community events here in Montreal – something like DemoCamp that went by the name of Montreal NewTech. Basically the event gives people a chance to demo their product or an early prototype of their product and gather some questions & feedback from the community. To make a long story short, one of the demos I saw lead me to look up a domain name related to one of the presentations I saw – and lo and behold the domain owner has his PO Box in the same location as I do.
I remembered seeing someone else using the same store as a whois address (obviously with a different box number), so I got curious and wanted to know if there are any other like-minded people using the same store. A quick search on Google “123 business st site:domaintools.com” revealed that there are at least seven(!) other people with more than 25 domains that own mailboxes in the same store (and a number of small businesses using a PO box as their whois address). I think send the people with 25+ names a note this week and invite them to next week’s DomainConvergence conference.
This kinda reminded me how back in the late 80s and early 90s I used a PO box in Germany to swap computer demos (= computer art) with other people all around the world. I got ended up running into someone who also picked up envelopes that curiously looks like they contained 5 1/4″ diskettes, so I approached them and found out that they were part of the “computer scene” as well – a friendship ensued.
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