[dns-operations] Denying Whois DB by GeoIP

[Bill Weiss]

Doug Barton(dougb at dougbarton.email)@Fri, Jun 09, 2017 at 06:51:26PM -0700:
> Daniel,
> 
> So kind of you to reply to the list on this. However I think there may be a
> larger problem. I wrote to y'all recently and received a similar answer to
> yours below. However I tried from 4 different networks, including the
> enterprise network for a major corporation, and got the same result, on the
> first query, every time.
> 
> Makes me wonder if there might be a flaw in your algorithm somewhere.
> 
> You might also consider the decades of research that has gone into
> demonstrating that spammers don't bother harvesting e-mail address from
> whois data. They have so many more cheap and easy sources that it's simply
> not worth it to them. Absent that as a motivation, one wonders what the
> benefit of rate-limiting whois data is in the first place.

I pretty strongly disagree with this. I get _tons_ of spam to the email
address I only use for domain registrations. Unless Gandi is selling their
customer lists (which I can't see happening) they're getting it from whois
:)

I would be quite interested in the research you're citing so I can see
what's unique about my situation.

(This isn't to say I think whois data should be harder to get at)

-- 
Bill Weiss