Re: WHOIS Privacy Stalemate... Again

[der Mouse <mouse () rodents montreal qc ca>]

> The concern that that WHOIS data is being used by spammers is
> probably only slightly true, and even it is, it's really not that big
> of a concern.

As someone who holds a domain with non-concealed WHOIS data, using
email addresses that appear (as far as I know) nowhere else, I feel
fairly confident in saying that WHOIS scraping is at most a trivial
contribution to spammer lists.

I can't recall the last time I saw a spam aimed at one of my domain
registration contact addresses.  I did a mechanical search of my
blocked mail from 2006-11-24 (this choice of date being related to the
way I file the stuff) to present and found exactly one such message.  I
searched my SMTP server's logs for the same period and got two hits,
one being the aforementioned message and the other being a real contact
from my ccTLD, not spam at all.

Of course, I can only guess at how much spam is aimed at one of those
addresses but is defeated before RCPT time.  But this does strike me as
evidence that anyone still doing WHOIS scraping is using old or
otherwise ineffective ratware...or perhaps just isn't scraping the .ca
ccTLD records. :-)

/~\ The ASCII                           der Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML               mouse () rodents montreal qc ca
/ \ Email!           7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
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