Banks and similar institutions frequently warn their customers not to click on links in e-mails claiming to be from those organizations, as those are common means of fraud, identity theft, and the like. Why GoDaddy would choose to take this path is a mystery.

It's actually not Godaddy's choice. It is a new requirement on all registrars imposed by ICANN. All registrars are required to do this now.

Here's an article on it:
http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/29/4478172/icann-to-require-verified-email-phone-number-for-domain-registration

Looks like they are required to suspend your website if you don't comply.

Not to sound like a corporate shill, but I love GoDaddy's support/customer service. First, they encourage you to call - some places try to ram you through online/"open a ticket" type stuff. Second, they'll walk you through any problems, and they're pretty darned good with that.

But the biggie was when I was on there a while ago and the guy called up my account and noticed that I had some redundancies (i.e. paying for an email product when I got free email with a different product). So we went through everything and he saved me some not-insignificant money. This was all proactive on his part. (And it happened another time when a different rep moved everything to matching billing cycles - it was a wash in the money department, but it saved me headaches with renewal notices, etc. Again, this was a "let's take a look at your account and not try to upseel, but to save you money" conversation.)

GoDaddy has always been a bunch of douchebags.

(Snoopy is right, however, that the basic idea is not GoDaddy's fault.

Their fault is how they managed the notification and the like.)

Not to sound like a corporate shill, but I love GoDaddy's support/customer service. -- AB at March 11, 2014 11:20 AM

GoDaddy is on my permanent shit list. There tech side screwed my last company from contacting their mortgage brokers for several months.

My company would send out weekly rate sheets to newspapers, mortgage brokers, and the like once a week. We had an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the e-mail. Well apparently enough of the idiot subscribers (more than two) marked it "spam" instead of using the unsubscribe link. Or going to the website and getting off the list.

Because two, or more, different companies did this GoDaddy marked all of our company's e-mail as spam. So we couldn't e-mail mortgage closing packages to any company that had a domain hosted with them. That was about 75 different companies.

And to add insult to injury -- GoDaddy was asking us to identify what e-mail caused us to get put in the spam list. How would we know? We didn't get an e-mail back. With that kind of logic we (the whole IT group) said screw them.

We finally got off the list but none of us trusted them after that.

"Because two, or more, different companies did this GoDaddy marked all of our company's e-mail as spam."

I've had that happen with Constant Contact - and at a brutal time. All of those companies (including GoDaddy) are fanatic about triggering any type of spam filter. If they suddenly get blacklisted by a gmail or yahoo, it could tank their company. So they set up rules that even catch "good guy" emailers.

I left GoDaddy when they supported SOPA a while back, and now this confirms just another bad practice. It does not seem like any of this is pressing, and having users click a link to verify email when they themselves didn't subscribe to anything is not good. I can only imagine the copycat spam that will follow this. And, it's not clear from the article linked that this is for current hosts, just for future ones. Bad implementation of a policy that isn't yet supposed to take effect.

"But I hate them for this and would like to switch every product I have with them."

Ms. Alkon:

I have not used this service, and I am not a shill for them, but have you looked at Hover?

https://www.hover.com/transfer_in

They advertise on many of the podcasts I listen to. The podcasters who have used their service seem very satisfied with it, especially the domain transfer portion.

I manage multiple web sites for clients. My hosting company (Bluehost) analysed the volume of files I had online in the middle of the night. Sometime shortly after that they suspended the account. Then they sent me an email notification. I woke to phone calls from clients whose web sites and email no longer worked.

I couldn't login to cleanup the account because it was on hold.

That episode and the annual multi-day outages has me looking for another hosting company.