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Please read about spam and wattle.id.au if you have received spam which mentions wattle.id.au.
Note: because of the volume of spam fraudulently pretending to be from wattle.id.au, I have disabled use of wattle.id.au itself as a mail destination. Instead please use nic.wattle.id.au for registry correspondence.
id.au third level domains were opened up in July 2002, see auDA's New Regime announcement.
The wattle.id.au service is continuing beyond July 2002 (in parallel with auDA's new regime).
The wattle.id.au sub-domain of id.au is maintained by David Keegel as a service to the Australian Internet community.
Registrations in wattle.id.au are free of charge. David is committed to not ever charging registrants in wattle.id.au.
You can find a fuller description of what id.au is at the id.au Web page. Briefly, id.au is a domain space set aside for Australian individuals to register their own private domain names (such as keegel.wattle.id.au). This allows an individual (or family) to have network addresses which are portable as they change jobs, schools or ISPs.
Please note that applying here does not give you a mailbox, user account, mail alias, or web page. But if you already have those sort of services, then what an id.au domain can do is give you a way to point to those services so that other people on the Internet can still find your mailbox/web page/etc even if you move its location later (when you change ISPs/jobs/schools).
Ultimately, the only thing wattle.id.au registry can supply you with is a domain name and associated DNS entries.
For this to be useful for receiving email for example, you must have available an SMTP server for your domain-to-be. This may be your own machine or your current ISP's machine, for instance. The SMTP server doesn't have to be set up when you register, but there is no point in registering here, if what you want is email and you cannot organise an SMTP server yourself. See the checklist for more details.
There are a number of sub-domain registries within id.au, named after Australian flora and fauna. (In the physical world, a wattle is a tree.) Until July 2002, your individual id.au domain name could only be registered by the registry of one of these sub-domains.
A useful checklist for wattle.id.au is the best way for most people to proceed.
The wattle.id.au policy, and a registration form are available directly (as well as through the above checklist). These resources and a few others are also available (in text form) in the FTP archive.
Note that wattle.id.au is maintained by a volunteer. If turnaround time of less than two weeks is important for you, or you need assistance with the DNS, it is suggested that you choose a different id.au sub-domain.
If you already have a wattle.id.au domain, you may change your details. If you have lost your domain token (password) you can request manual token recovery.
If you would prefer to send your confidential details encrypted, you can use the wattle.id.au PGP Key in E-mail to hostmaster at nic.wattle.id.au. Note: use PGP version 2.6.x or lower.
I have started working on a Privacy Policy but its not really finished yet...