On Fri, Oct 24, 2014 at 03:13:48PM -0400, Barry Shein wrote:
Though I've no doubt someone out there imagines improving the quality of the database would help with spam I tend to doubt it.
It might. So would removing the farce of 'private' domain registration. What would also help is removing the antiquated and byzantine boilerplate adhesions that result when one queries WHOIS data. And finally, what would help is dumping daily snapshots of all WHOIS data so that it's possible to just grab the entire thing in one compressed (text? XML?) file with a single rsync/wget -- with the minor caveat that such snapshots will always lag behind actual data. (Some folks will claim that this will result in increased spam to domain owners. This is false. First, the spammers already have all those addresses and are busy selling them to each other and using them when they see fit. Second, domain registrations are not a particularly rich source of addresses, as the subset of email addresses which are mentioned in them is small compared to the set of all email addresses.) ---rsk