Is the .to (Tonga) domain completely rogue an

Thu Oct 1 07:04:37 UTC 1998

Mr. Shein:

I am the hostmaster and Administrative, Technical and Zone Contact at Tonic, the top level domain name registration authority for the .TO country code. (http://rs.internic.net/cgi-bin/whois?to5-dom).

Since June 1997, our automated domain name registry at http://www.tonic.to has been facilitating the registration of .TO names as a service to the global Internet community. (Neither Tonic nor IANA policy requires the registered owner of a .TO name to be physically situated in the Kingdom of Tonga.)

>We've been having increasing problems with one or more porn sites in the
>.to domain promoting itself by massive spamming of
>AOL customers using one of our domains in their From: header thus causing
>both complaints to us and thousands of bounces
>from AOL due to bad AOL addresses in their spam lists.

We are sorry to hear that you have been having problem with SPAM involving a .TO domain, and wish to draw your attention to the fact that .TO is the *only* top level domain we know of with an explicit antispam policy. We at Tonic feel strongly about spam, and believe it to be theft of service, and a very bad thing for the net in general.

It is our policy to terminate the registration of a domain name involved in spam, after warning the domain name holder to cease unsolicited bulk mailings that involve a .TO name.

>From our FAQ (at http://www.tonic.to/faq.htm):

   Q: I'm a spammer. Is a .TO domain something I         should use?

   Tonic feels very strongly that the sending of      unsolicited bulk email ("spamming") constitutes    theft of service, and we do not condone the
   use of .TO domain names for this purpose.

   If we receive complaints that a .TO domain name    has been used for this purpose, we will advise     the domain owner of the complaint and
   request that they desist from this activity.       Tonic reserves the right
   to remove any .TO name registration if a name      is used as a source of spam,
   or an address to which to reply to such bulk       mail solicitations

We have had to delete a number of .TO domains for egregious SPAM and will continue to do so in the cases where a stern warning fails to solve the problem. Please send a copy of any SPAM involving a .TO domain name to:  hostmaster at tonic.to and we will warn the spammer and/or terminate the domain name registration.

>Looking at the .to domain I can't help but notice it's heavily laden with
>what appear to be porn sites (sexonline.to, come.to,
>xxxhardcore.to, etc.)

The .COM domain is no less "heavily laden" with porn sites.  You will note that sexonline.com and xxxhardcore.com are names registered with the InterNIC.  The come.to site is a free web redirection site supporting more than 100,000 customers.  Furthermore, Tonic is a domain name registry, not a content censor.
>In support of this assertion I want to show you an SMTP conversation with
>what claims to be the Consulate of the
>Government of Tonga in San Francisco (This San Francisco office is listed
>as an official Tongan contact point for visas etc by
>the US State Dept):
>
>world% telnet sfconsulate.gov.to 25
>
>Trying 209.24.51.169...
>Connected to sfconsulate.gov.to.
>Escape character is '^]'.
>220 colo.to SMTP ready, Who are you gonna pretend to be today? VRFY
postmaster
>500 Bloody Amateur! Proper forging of mail requires recognizable SMTP
>commands!

The primary nameserver for .TO is physically located at the Consulate of Tonga in San Francisco. On all our machines, we run the Obtuse smtpd/smtpfwdd SMTP store and forward proxy (http://www.obtuse.com/smtpd.html) to secure our port 25 and thereby prevent third party mail relaying, so our server cannot itself be used
as a spam relay.

Your reasoning as to why its responses to incorrect SMTP commands constitutes
evidence that the .TO domain is "negligent", "mismanaged" and "an attractive resource for criminal activities" is ironically incorrect. In fact, having an *unsecured* port 25 open to mail relaying would be negligent.

[Our thanks to the many participants in this thread who have presented views balancing those of Barry Shein.]

Best regards,

- Eric Gullichsen
  Tonic Corporation
  Kingdom of Tonga Network Information Center
  http://www.tonic.to
  Email: egullich at tonic.to

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