5 ms·
It should be trivial for them to ... send a mailshot out to each ... webmaster address Well indeed, but even if you ignore the time taken to do WHOIS lookups a
by mootothemax 16y ago
It should be trivial for them to ... send a mailshot out to each ... webmaster address
Well indeed, but even if you ignore the time taken to do WHOIS lookups and presume that they'll go to the right person (e.g. blogs hosted on Wordpress.com) you're still ignoring the serious amount of computing power that it takes to send a significant number of emails.
- mike-cardwell 16y agoI was suggesting webmaster@domain for each of the domains. Not 100% full proof, but no method is. I'm assuming we're talking about thousands of emails here, not millions.
- mootothemax 16y agoI'm assuming we're talking about thousands of emails here, not millions. When was the last time you tried sending thousands of emails? It's a surprisingly non-trivial task to send more than a few hundred emails - and that's ignoring setting off spam filters and getting IP addresses blacklisted. Speaking honestly, I like your idea, but it's my opinion that if it were that simple then the jQuery guys would do it. Since it isn't that simple, they're not.
- mike-cardwell 16y agoYou're saying this to the wrong person. I run mail systems for a living. IMO, it is a trivial task to send tens of thousands of emails. It should take about a minute to craft a one liner to pull the relevant domains out of the access logs. It should then take maybe half an hour or less to write a batch script to queue up the emails. Then sit back and watch them go... What else is there?
- mootothemax 16y agoYou're saying this to the wrong person. I run mail systems for a living. IMO, it is a trivial task to send tens of thousands of emails. What hardware are you running that supports sending out tens of thousands of emails, handling the inevitable DNS errors, timeouts, bounces (yes yes, I've read about the RFC ;)) and that manages all of this in a reasonable amount of time? Genuine question, I'm curious.
- mike-cardwell 16y agoIf we're only discussing tens of thousands of emails, I'd probably get the cheapest Linode available and bung Exim on it. The average home PC could handle this without issue...
- rhizome 16y agoShouldn't need to do whois lookups, webmaster@ is required by RFC. http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2068.html http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2068.html
- pyre 16y agoWell, then. They can just report any domains that bounce webmaster@domain to the local authorities, and a round of arrests and/or fines will definitely be in order.
- chronomex 16y agorfc-ignorant.org is all over that already.
- rmc 16y agoIn theory yes. However since that address gets a lot of spam, it's quite unlikely that that email address is looked at. RFC are a good guide, but the community has mostly dropped that webmaster@ convention.
- mike-cardwell 16y agoReally? I thought it was still common in the community. Why do you think otherwise?
- tedunangst 16y agoThe only occurrence I can find of the word webmaster on that page is using it in an example of a client setting the From request header.