Re: [tlug] spammers

[Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com>]

On Sat, Mar 13, 2004 at 10:04:25AM +0100, Godwin Stewart wrote:

>Agreed, although I'd be more inclined to say "virtually 100%" rather than
>"far in excess of 90%".

Well, four or five nines is what I had in mind :-)

Believe it or not, there are actually a few legit .biz domains
out there.  In fact, we have a few of them as customers.   I
suspect they probably date back to the days before spammers took
over .biz and .info.  Even .us is rather suspect now.

It's interesting that one thing you (or at least I) don't seem
to ever see discussed in anti-spam forums is how much spamming
benefits domain registrars.  Some of them seem to have a lot
more spam domains than others, too.  This may be solely a matter
of price, but I suspect that some registrars have some form of
pink contract with some spammers.  The way they go through
throway domains is kind of impressive to watch.  To a spammer,
registering 50 domains at a crack and only getting a week's good use
out of them before they are all filtered to oblivion is just a cost
of doing business.

The registrars must have a resaonable idea of who they are and what
they are doing (you can't hide that sort of activity from data mining
software, or even from admins who are watching), yet it goes on
week in and week out.  I don't think any registrar would fold from
putting in effective safeguards to keep spammers out, but it would
nevertheless affect the bottom line.  Registrars have investors to
keep happy and most of those investors probably only care about
profitable or not profitable, and a spammer's money is the same color
as everyone else's, so they take it and keep the investors happy.
Collectively, I wouldn't be surprised if spammers account for 10% of
new domain registratiosn, at least on some days.

>I only know one person who has a .biz domain and he doesn't use it to send
>mail because he's fed up with people rejecting it because of the gTLD...

Yeah, I can imagine.  If I see mail from a .biz or .info, I just 
assume it's spam.  In my professional capacity I have to check, of
course, but it's always spam.

Jonathan
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