On Fri, 31 Aug 2001, Leland V. Lammert wrote:
> At 04:39 PM 8/30/01 -0700, William X Walsh wrote:
>
> >Bizland sent out a huge number of unsolicited email ads for webhosting
> >service today that were clearly whois harvested, and even included the
> >domain name. They tried to make them look opt-in, but due to the
> >nature of some privacy arrangements we have setup for some customers,
> >we know for a fact that this was not an opt-in campaign (it would be
> >impossible for them to claim that these addresses opt-ed in).
>
> Bill,
>
> If you don't want to receive any UCE, .. don't list your email anywhere.
> There is no way to keep somebody like Bizland from harvesting emals from a
> public source.
>
> It's not worth worrying about, .. nor worth taking list bandwidth.
>
> Lee
>
Lee, telling people not to list their email address anywhere when they
are in the domain name business (and thus have hundreds or thousands or
even hundreds of thousands of whois records) is pretty useless advice.
Personally I think I should be able to register a domain and not get
clobbered with crud the next day. These practices make first time
domain buyers, and newbies to the net especially gunshy and generally
turned off.
The spam comes in so fast after regging their name they think the people
they bought the name from are either the ones spamming them or that their
personal info has been sold (many of them are not even aware of what
a whois record is)
So this is a larger issue "not liking to recieve to spam". It has
customer relations aspects and when you're dealing with a lot of
domain names it adds up (perhaps you are not regging enough domains
that its effects have become noticable to you at a business level).
In short, it is worth worrying about.
-mark
P.S. I case you thought I would post on this topic without plugging the
whois-harverster-buster at http://myprivacy.ca, you thought wrong :)
--
mark jeftovic
http://www.easydns.com
http://mark.jeftovic.net
