-----Original Message----- From: Jeff Chan [mailto:jeffc@surbl.org] Sent: Saturday, October 09, 2004 3:10 AM To: SURBL Discussion list Subject: Re: [SURBL-Discuss] Revised DMOZ data, got Wikipedia domains too
On Friday, October 8, 2004, 11:37:03 PM, Alex Broens wrote:
tripod and geocities have given spammers a home for many years... and there's many other freehosters who have become "victims" as well.
if not permitted to blacklist, at least treat as 2nd level
tld so we can
get rid of the spam coming from them
That's possible, but not something we've done so far. I don't see shared domain hosting as a major spam destination. Maybe they are a minor annoyance, but nothing like the pill spammers hosted in China, Korea, Brazil, etc.
The difference is that geocities, tripod, angelfire, etc. ought to have some incentive to get rid of these minor abusers since they make so little money from them. The pill/mortgage/warez/etc. spam hosters probably make a lot more money from their spamming customers, so they have an incentive too keep them.
In the case where there is some legitimate company like Yahoo or Lycos (parents of geocities, tripod, etc) to police their customers and enforce their AUPs, then spam victims should report them and let them do the enforcing. Since these companies are mostly legitimate and probably do spend some resources dealing with abuse, they have an incentive to reduce abuse since it probably costs them more money than it gains them.
One of the main reasons for doing SURBLs was to be able to do something about the hosting companies who don't have AUPs against spam or don't enforce them.
Bottom line is that tripod, etc. are mostly irrelevant compared to the professional spam gangs who send a lot more spam. SURBLs are for listing the domains of the bigger fish who have found spam-friendly hosts, regardless of where those hosts are.
All I can say to that is, it is small amount....for now.
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.
--Chris