RE: URIWhois-0.02

Quoting Bret Miller <bret.miller@wcg.org>:

> Perhaps rather than arguing about whether we'd all get blocked by running
> this, it would be more productive to lobby a registrar to provide the data
> in rsynch-able form to URIBL or SURBL where DNS infrastructure could be used
> to make the data available for such a use. Maybe none will cooperate, maybe
> one will.

Thanks for the sentiment. We do have some special access to whois data, but truth be known, the whois data is not always as useful as one might think, for some of the reasons I mention in my next reply.

> We can agree that
>
> 1. Querying whois directly is a bad idea if you have significant mail
> volume.
>
> 2. Whois data (namely, the domain creation date) can provide a hint that the
> URI might point to a spammer site.
>
> So, how can we get whois data without going directly to whois for every
> query?

There are other pieces of information that are nearly as useful, without referencing whois at all. We will be making more use of them in SURBLs in future.

Jeff C. Received on Thu Sep 27 21:25:02 2007