----- Original Message ----- From: "Eric Kolve"
Initially, when I released spamcopuri I decided to pretty much ignore whether the TLD was a country code or not. This results in about twice as many queries as necessary, but guaranteed you would get hits if the domain was listed.
Now that people are pointing this to other RBL's beside just surbl, should we continue to do second and third level queries? Or just the query that we assume to be necessary? My concern is that not all RBLs will process the domains according to a list such as http://www.bestregistrar.com/help/ccTLD.htm. I suppose the worst case scenario is we end up getting a miss when we should be getting a hit because one side presumes that say TLD .za has a subdomain 'foo', when the server doesn't. The server side would expect a second level,
while
the client would do a third level query (this is why I wanted the wildcard records). I guess this really isn't that great a consequence considering the savings and the fact that this shouldn't occur very often.
I will go ahead and make this change if everyone is comfortable with the known risk.
I think if an rhsbl is listing a second level registry domain (like .co.uk) then I think it's up to the list maintainer to implement the wild card so that xxxxx.co.uk returns an A record. I wouldn't worry about taking into account such an extreme case, since I cannot imagine any list wanting to do such widespread blocking.
I believe there should be a mechanism which distinguishes whether a second or third level lookup is required based on a static lists of domains known to have or not have subdomains. If nothing is known then the default should be to check both second and third as at present.
John