Apologies for starting a new thread - I seem to recall one recently regarding somebody who was having difficulty making more than X requests per Y seconds to the WHOIS servers (receiving disconnects). Received a spam recently from 212.171.42.117 offering the contents of .com/.net/.org/.edu on 4 CDs (reported to the usual sources - spamcop, abuse@domain, abuse@upstream, and in this case, abuse@internic.net (see below) ). My annoyance at receiving a spam is fairly limited - I have become used to it by now. However, I am curious - the WHOIS servers (some of them, anyway) contain a statement in the connect message that explicitly prohibits commercial use of the registry. And IIRC that earlier thread, too many connection attempts from a single location in a certain amount of time would cause a disconnect (presumably to thwart this very type of datamining). ==== "By submitting a WHOIS query, you agree that you will use this Data only for lawful purposes and that, under no circumstances will you use this Data to: (1) allow, enable, or otherwise support the transmission of mass unsolicited, commercial advertising or solicitations via e-mail (spam); or (2) enable high volume, automated, electronic processes that apply to Network Solutions (or its systems)." ==== Is NetSol/VeriSign serious about enforcing this? Are they willing to blackhole abusers? One would think it would be a trivial matter to engineer the servers such that more than X attempts per Y seconds either results in a block (temporary or permanent) or flags the activity for later review (a la IDS). Perhaps I am vastly oversimplifying such a task. I sent my concerns to NetSol's abuse department already, but I hold little hope of that achieving anything of lasting significance. I was really hoping to get either "been there, done that", "try X" or even "this is off-topic - stop polluting the list" from those of you that have been down this road before. -- Scott Francis darkuncle@ [home:] d a r k u n c l e . n e t Systems/Network Manager sfrancis@ [work:] t o n o s . c o m GPG public key 0xCB33CCA7 illum oportet crescere me autem minui