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

Fri Oct 2 02:43:24 UTC 1998

How about you give us some information on who is providing the resources
for these people.  Give a list of who is providing the following
resources, and everyone on the list can help plead/yell/complain to folks
providing the more concrete resources the perps need to operate.

Things like:

a) dialup provider that sources the spam
b) nameservers
c) webservers
d) mailboxes for replies

I for one would be more than happy to pull out my form letters and mail my
brains out.  It would be more constructive than any of the bickering going
on here.

Thanks,

Charles

On Thu, 1 Oct 1998, Barry Shein wrote:

> Date: Thu, 1 Oct 1998 20:14:47 -0400
> From: Barry Shein <bzs at world.std.com>
> To: "Jay R. Ashworth" <jra at scfn.thpl.lib.fl.us>
> Cc: nanog at merit.edu
> Subject: Re: Is the .to (Tonga) domain completely rogue and should be removed?
> 
> 
> 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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