That's exactly the problem.... "the goal of tasting is to collect pay per click ad revenue"... Ten years ago the internet was for porn, now it's for MLM/Affiliate/PPC scams. As long as we put up with companies abusing the Internet as long as they are making a buck, they'll keep doing it. The scams will change, but they'll still be scaming. On 12 Aug 2007 13:41:17 -0000, John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
I'd like to but I don't know of a practical way to measure the impact of domain tasting on my services: how can I do 6 million whois lookups to analyse a day's logs to find what proportion of our email comes "from" tasty domains?
Probably not much. Domain tasting requires a registrar who is willing to handle millions of AGP refunds without charging the registrant, which effectively rules out anyone who isn't a registrar himself. The goal of tasting is to collect pay per click ad revenue, which requires that one have a stable enough identity to have Adsense et al pay you. Spam these days all comes from zombies with real but irrelevant return addresses, and the target URLs are more likely to be bought with stolen credit cards.
The problems with domain tasting more affect web users, with vast number of typosquat parking pages flickering in and out of existence.
The real way to get rid of tasting would be to persuade Google and Yahoo/Overture to stop paying for clicks on pages with no content other than ads, but that would be far too reasonable.
R's, John