no whois info ?

Thu Dec 9 20:10:14 UTC 2004

At 02:33 PM 12/9/2004, Mike Tancsa wrote:

>At 01:50 PM 09/12/2004, Jeff Rosowski wrote:
>>>>shell1% whois vestigial3had.com
>>>...
>>>>No match for "VESTIGIAL3HAD.COM".
>>>>What gives ?  How can there be no whois info anywhere ?
>>
>>You can also make whois information private, usually for an additional fee.
>
>I wonder what % of domains that have their whois info hidden or "private" 
>are throwaway spam domains...  Some number approaching 100% I would bet.

I would doubt that.

We have started hiding the information for clients who request it for a 
simple reason: use of WHOIS data for marketing.

Anyone want to guess how many credit cards have been offered to "Host 
Master" and "Master Host" addressed to our Technical contact address?

We have clients complaining about the junk email, junk faxes and junk 
postal mail that results from these listings.

Then there's the folks who send out offers to "renew" domains, but in the 
very fine print say "this is not a bill" and are really an attempt to 
transfer the domain name to another provider. We've had customers fall for 
these, thinking the invoices were from us, and in cases where the customer 
didn't have their domain locked against transfers, have their web sites go 
dark.

>  It would be nice to somehow incorporate this into a SpamAssassin check 
> somehow.

Your basic assumption is faulty.

The WHOIS data is there to ensure there's someone to contact. As long as 
the data listed can be used to reach the domain holder for legitimate 
purposes (technical problems, etc.), why should you care if the listed 
address is a Care Of address, the email address goes through a redirect or 
is handled by an agent trusted by the domain holder?

Yes, I understand the concern that spammers might use the mechanism to 
hide. I'm concerned about that too, but not enough to override my concern 
about the marketing use of the data, often in campaigns that border on scams.