.mail is .gay
I’ve always had a spam problem. I think the crap grows on me or something. I have adopted the following filtering strategy on my mail servers. First the messages are passed into sendmail, the sender’s IP is then checked against the XBL from SpamHaus. If the IP makes it through that test, they are then passed to amavisd-new running as a sendmail milter. amavisd-new runs the messages through Clam AntiVirus and another virus checker, which are both updated 48 times per day. If the message is virus free, it is then passed to SpamAssassin 3.0 which checks it against a number of realtime black lists and checks for spamish words and phrases. All of this takes a lot of CPU energy, especially if it’s a clean message, so when I read on SpamHaus’ site that they were proposing a new TLD (top level domain, like .com, .net, .museum, etc…) to the ICANN called .mail, I was quite intrigued.
So this TLD would make it so that your domain would send out mail as example.com.mail and any .mail address would be exempt from mail filters, because you can’t have a .mail address without meeting a whole lot of criteria. The main reason that I think this is a stupid idea is the cost. The initial startup of a .mail domain is proposed at an obscene $2000US! Thus ruling out any small company that does send perfectly legitimate email out from getting one or more of these TLDs registered. It’s pretty stupid to charge such an exorbitant price just so that you can ensure that your mail is being sent out, per domain. I have a bunch of domain names and would need at the very least, two .mail domains to make this system work for me. By all means, do a thorough check on my information, make sure I don’t send out spam, charge me a one time $200US service charge for the work that you have to do, and then a $10US/year annual fee and be done with it. If I have my domain for 180 more years, you’ll get your full $2000. Also, if I change my domain name, I only want to pay $10 for my other domain, not another administration fee.
The greed of this proposed organization is tremendous. Only the giants would ever consider getting a .mail at this price and we’re not even looking at the fact that every mail server would have to support the .mail TLD going around their filters. So, you’re really buying into something that some people might use. Yeah, right, like that’s worth $2000US.
Also in domain news, Verisign has filed a complaint against ICANN for making them shut down their awful SiteFinder service, which was basically forcing users to suffer Verisign’s advertizing while surfing for nonexistant sites (instead of seeing your browser’s error response to a missing site.) I’m going to go block all verisign.com.mail from my server right now.
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