On Saturday, October 9, 2004, 6:20:13 AM, Chris Santerre wrote:
I don't see any harm in treating these as second and thrid TLDs. We are already doing all the same work, and seeing the same domains anyway while looking at spams. Why not just add them as 2-3 level? We are doing all the work now, and just throwing the listing away.
One reason for not doing it is that there was not an easy programatic way (on the client side) to distinguish subdomain.tripod.com as something to be checked instead of tripod.com. One quick answer is to check them both, and SpamAssassin or SpamCopURI may do that, but if so, that's probably more for convenience than correctness.
Remember the original goal was to find registrar domains in order to go after the BIG spammers who register new domains very frequently. That is the target we're going after: the professional spam gangs who burn through a bazillion domains, not the occasionally abused legitimate site.
Jeff C. -- "If it appears in hams, then don't list it."