On Thursday, May 6, 2004, 9:18:17 PM, David Hooton wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: discuss-bounces@lists.surbl.org [mailto:discuss- bounces@lists.surbl.org] On Behalf Of Robert Menschel
The name.tld started life as a 3-level TLD. Many people have individual abc.def.name domains (eg: my own robert.menschel.name).
If you strip that third level, that means that if someone registers spammer.menschel.name (which I have no control over), since I cannot register menschel.name), and spammer.menschel.name then gets added to your lists, my robert.menschel.name will be collateral damage.
We've also found professional email marketing companies which are used by both large whitehat companies & some other companies which are far less reputable. These companies regularly use the client.domain.com format for image & href urls, rather than blocking the whole domain we block/whitelist the subdomain.
Is there a problem in leaving this kind of flexibility in the plugin and also the surbl.org SURBL's?
In principle the system can be made to handle subdomains or any arbitrary levels of domains, but in practice we have not found it useful or necessary very often. Typically a domain is either spammy or it isn't. Reputable domains don't allow spammer subdomains; for example spammer.yahoo.com or spammer.msn.com don't exist or wouldn't for very long.
Most of the hard core spammers seem to use a disposable second level .com domain for a few days then abandon it in favor of a new one.
The quick and perhaps somewhat wrong solution is to whitelist client.domain.com if domain.com is partially legitimate. In practice we don't see that happening too often, though I'm interested in hearing examples.
Jeff C.