On Sun, 12 Dec 2004, Janet Sullivan wrote:
william(at)elan.net wrote:
It matters if we're talking about Tom, John or Susan working for some commercial company and contacting me as part of the activity of that entity, in that case I'd like to know about the domain and don't want to see its whois data hidden.
I find it somewhat amusing that the whois record for elan.net refers to a hostmaster role account and a P.O. Box. ;-)
That PO Box is registered to the company and as such you can request from USPS a copy of the registration and will find current office address and contact name. Note that if PO Box is used by individual than the address and name are kept confidential unless that individual indicated he's going to use PO Box for business activities. The rules about privacy of information on PO Boxes pretty much supports what I wrote, so thank you for giving me a chance to show our own practical example :)
I do agree that a "one size fits all" rule rarely fits all situations. Do I support anonymous registrations for non-commercial sites as long as they can still be contacted? Yes. Do I support them for large corporations? Not necessarily. Do I support the right of end users to filter their mail any way they choose? Sure. Do I support the right of a provider to filter their user's mail any way they choose? Not necessarily.
The last one is same as previous one - you have chosen your provider and as such there is a contractual relationship for getting these services if you do not believe the services meet your needs, you find another provider, So its all the same and is basicly the right of the user to choose how his/hers email would be filters and that maybe direct choice of exactly which mail filters are to be used or it maybe a choice of which company would filter the email or all of that maybe outsourced to ISP.
Unfortunately, there isn't a perfect way to tell if a site is commercial or not by it's domain name.
If somebody sends me an email with morgage offer, I consider it to be a commercial email and expect to come registered mrtgage broker with publickly known address. Same for almost all other offers you receive by unsolicited email.
To me, a false positive is worse than spam getting through. I realize other people have other opinions. I just don't want to see wide spread filtering of mail from anonymous (ala domainsbyproxy) whois records.
I note that I did not suggest that nor do I see any easy way to implement it (because godaddy has one of the most stict rules about limiting access to whois by automated means). My current project goal is to only use use internic whois data (which means no registrant's or contact names or addresses) and only use it to stop use of domains where registrar has put a hold status on it or where the domain registrations it too new to be in whois (and email would not be denied but simply postponed until more information is known about the registrant and registrar had a chance to decide if their new domain and its use are in violation of their policies or not). The goal is to combat through-away domains and force spammers to use well known names that can be traced to them and their business activities. Then legal and other pressure can be applied to those known business entities to stop their abuse of email infrastructure. -- William Leibzon Elan Networks william@elan.net