[SURBL-Discuss] RFC: SURBL software implemetation guidelines

Simon Byrnand simon at igrin.co.nz
Mon Apr 19 14:08:11 CEST 2004


At 12:43 19/04/2004, Jeff Chan wrote:


> >    1. Extract URIs from message bodies. (Extraction of URIs
> > from message bodies should ideally include full resolution of
> > redirections into the final target domain name. This can be a
> > non-trivial problem.)

Indeed :)

> >    2. Extract base (registrar) domains from those URIs. This
> > includes removing any and all leading host names, subdomains,
> > www., randomized subdomains, etc. In order to determine the
> > base domain it may be necessary to use a table of country code
> > TLDs (ccTLDs) such as the partially-imcomplete one SURBL uses.

Ok, now this one worries me a little bit - how well is this handled 
currently in SpamCopURI and SA 3.0 ? Because while I was looking through 
the SpamCopURI source code, I saw a comment that said:

   #   # take foo.bar.yahoo.com to yahoo.com
   #   # this kind of breaks for co.uk and
   #   # we could get false domain level matches

Here in New Zealand our domain heirachy is 3rd level the same as .uk - the 
country code is .nz and the second level is one of only a few specifically 
allowed by the registrar - co,net,gen,school,govt and a few others... 
(can't remember them all off hand, but theres less than 10)

It's the third level which is delegated to individual organisations. For 
example our email domain is igrin.co.nz.

If a spammer were to register a domain in NZ it would look like:

spammer.co.nz or spammer.net.nz or spammer.gen.nz etc.... randomised 
subdomains that they could create on their own nameservers would look like 
a65423xyz.spammer.co.nz or awef3242.fssf342.spammer.co.nz etc...

Will the current code (of both SpamCopURI, and the backend processing of 
the surbl servers for that matter) incorrectly strip this off to co.nz ? I 
ask, because I have definately seen dns queries from SpamCopURI trying to 
look up co.nz.sc.surbl.org which is wrong - that would cover a large 
fraction of the websites under the NZ domain heirachy, it should be looking 
up spammer.co.nz, never co.nz.

Is there any reliable way for the code to know what a base registrar domain 
is and how many tiers there are under that domain heirachy ? (May also be a 
non-trivial problem)

Regards,
Simon



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