Jason,

Your suggestion is a very sensible and workable solution. Email addresses
are in whois to ensure a registrant is contactable - not to provide another
data point for spammers. Forcing a manual form to be used would go all the
way towards providing contactability whilst maintaining some centralised
monitoring and control over abuse. Moreover, it's a solution that can be
implemented at the registry level, minimising impact for the rest of the
industry. There _are_ instances where a visual sighting of the registrants
email address is needed, but this is mainly at the registrar level (for
verification of transfer requests for example), and I doubt there are any
that are registrar spammers.

Simply saying that it's auDA policy and therefore auDA's issue is a
dereliction of duty of care of .AU DNS integrity and  a cop out. Clearly
accepting there is an issue and working collaboratively - at the policy,
regulatory and technical solution levels - is the way to address this.

Personally, I'd like to see a solution. Australia leads the world in many
aspect of DNS policy, and this is another global issue we can demonstrate
leadership on.

AusRegistry and registrars could definitely take their market experiences -
including comment here - and use their (our) influence at the
regulatory/policy level with auDA to progress a solution.

As Marty noted there is a forthcoming whois policy review. I'll certainly
take Jason's suggestion to that forum and would be keen to continue the
debate here to see what other creative ideas can be considered.

Larry

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jason Allen [mailto:jallen§pobox.com] 
> Sent: Thursday, 21 July 2005 2:47
> To: dns§dotau.org
> Subject: [DNS] Re: Whois & Spam
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, 21 Jul 2005, Adrian Kinderis wrote:
> 
> > Perhaps you could come up with ideas, other than "masking the email 
> > address", that would solve this "problem"...
> 
> Remove/mask the registrant and tech email addresses. Make the 
> Registrant 
> ROID and Tech ID a hyperlinked URL that goes to an 
> AusRegistry page that 
> is a standard "send an email" form. The processing of the 
> page will take 
> the Registrant ROID or Tech ID and perform a lookup of the 
> matching email 
> address, sending the email to that user. The input form will 
> also have a 
> dynamic obscured alpha-numeric (that were all used to 
> now-a-days) that the 
> users is required to type in to ensure they aren't an automated 
> program/script.
> 
> Fairly easy solutions if you ask me...
> 
> ---
> Cheers,
> Jason
> 
> Ideas don't stay in some minds very long because they don't 
> like solitary confinement.
> 
> -- 
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