For web marketing training, presentations and workshops visit Pacifica Training. If you wish to ask questions about website marketing please head over and register free at the website marketing forum, a knowledge base and community driven discussion group.
Register a domain, buy some spam
Published: December 8, 2006
A record has been broken! A new .co.uk domain name I have bought received an unsolicited email with 25 minutes of activation.
In the line of duty, I tend to buy quite a few domain names. As most developers do, I bought a domain that sounds fairly useful and put it in my back pocket for a rainy day. Upon activation of the domain, in other words, the moment it resolved to the host, within 25 minutes, I'll say again, 25 minutes, I received the following email:
email advertise like this to 8,000,000 people... free..
www[dot]advertisingemailcorporation[dot]com
advertise now for christmas... 18 days left...
the above noncommercial offer is only for noncommercial charities only. press on charity info on our web site for full and complete details. this offer is not a commercial service and is not at all for sale or lease or trade of any kind.
Congratulations, you have excelled yourselves in reaching a market not interested in your products.
The public whois database
Unless the registrant of the domain is handing the details out like candy, which is very unlikely, the biggest culprit is the publication of the whois directory. I'm not sure who it serves and why it's public and I know you can opt out your personal details if you're an individual but it's the single biggest source of spammable contacts that exists on the planet.
Here's a novel concept: DON'T PUBLISH IT!
Useful?
Assistance?
Comments
Ma says:
Andy Fletcher says:
25 Minutes?! That is truly amazing on the one hand, and a sad indication of just how much automation is going on in the SPAM biz.
I was getting comment SPAM on my contact page even though (and I hate to admit this) my site doesn't actually get any visitors yet. Funny thing is, I implemented a CAPTCHA to the contact page and even though I didn't configure it properly (IE it doesn't actually stop a robot posting) the SPAM stopped instantly. The robot that was doing it presumably checks for a CAPTCHA and goes away if it finds one without testing to see if if works or not.
Freelinerentalmobiles.co.uk says:
Was it a commonly used email e.g. admin@domain.com or webmaster@domain.com ?
Or is it possible that the domain had been previously registered?
Ironically, whois details are published partly to help fight spam in the sense that it adds some accountability and yet adds to the spam problem. It has improved a lot in recent years though... there used to be no protection on the number of queries from a single source!
We all hate spam and we love to blame spammers. But if you buy products or services from spam email, you are just as guilty as the spammers for creating the problem.