no whois info ?

Fri Dec 10 12:19:40 UTC 2004

Elmar K. Bins <elmi at 4ever.de> wrote:
> abuse at cabal.org.uk (Peter Corlett) wrote:
[...]
>> This tempts me to hack something into Exim that does a whois on
>> previously-unseen sender domains, and give a deferral if the whois
>> denies existence of the domain. Is this likely to have any
>> meaningful effect?

> No. It depends too much on
> (a) the registry and registrar for the domain
> (b) overall whois availability to that TLD (not everybody uses whois)
> (c) your connectivity to the whois servers involved (possibly more
> than one)

You have a point if I were attempting to do this for all TLDs, but at
least for a first cut, I'm only interested in .com/.net. A single
query of whois.crsnic.net (and not bothering to follow referrals)
would be sufficient to determine the existence of the domain in whois.

There's some awful tinpot domain registrars out there where you have
to wonder if their whois server is on the end of a dialup link, but
fortunately I'm not attempting to access those. Connectivity from here
to the CRSNIC server is good and no worse than to any other server I
may wish to query for purposes of black- or greylisting.

-- 
The advice given me about Maglites is to hold it out sideways from yourself
but at shoulder height, this makes the opponent think you are standing 3
foot to one side of reality.
					- Rob Adams in the Monastery