Is the .to (Tonga) domain completely rogue and should be removed?

Barry Shein bzs at world.std.com
Fri Oct 2 00:14:47 UTC 1998


On October 1, 1998 at 19:43 jra at scfn.thpl.lib.fl.us (Jay R. Ashworth) wrote:
 > Damnit, Barry:
 > 
 > DID YOU MAKE THE CALL?
 > 
 > Cjeers,
 > -- jra
 > -- 
 > Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com

You know, you're being boorish Jay but I'll answer anyhow because you
seem so fascinated with this train of thought it's made you blind to
the obvious:

As fast as one of these .to domains is shut down the domain hijackers
open another .to domain, apparently within minutes, and continue
spamming with that.

So it's not doing a lot of good asking tonic to shut down domain a.to
when that just results in seeing spam shortly thereafter advertising
b.to and then c.to and d.to and e.to and f.to etc.

One major problem is the mismanagement of the .to domain, and to what
purpose (apparently not to serve the Kingdom of Tonga as a national
TLD) remains fairly mysterious, other than "for money" and whatever
damage it does to others be damned.

It's like a site which won't close an open mail relay. Sure, it's
ultimately the spammers exploiting the open relay which are the actual
perps. But if all the open mail relay will do, for example, is block
the one domain from relaying so the spammers just jump to another
domain and use them as an open relay again, and again, and
again...well then just informing them of the latest domain on an
hourly basis isn't really doing it.


-- 
        -Barry Shein

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