For what it's worth I personally agree that the whois should have an XML component.
But *NOT* until we creatively address the spammer issue.
Yes spammers will in the end get email addresses. But I firmly believe there is more than enough intelectual horsepower among the internet community to come up with a way to make whois mining intractable .....


Again, just my 2 cents as well as my attempt to put the cart before the horse ... ;-)


On Wed, 22 Jan 2003 11:06:10 -0800
"Lynn W. Taylor" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
At the same time, it seems IOTTMCO that the administrator's E-Mail address should be a field in the RRP (RFC-2832) and not part of a protocol where the response is by definition free-form.

-- Lynn

On Wed, 22 Jan 2003 19:49:53 +0100, Csongor Fagyal wrote:
Lynn W. Taylor wrote:

Oh, please!

I get enough spam without making it easier for the bastards to parse WHOIS.

A spammer will get your e-mail address simply grepping for, say,
\s+(\S+\@\S+\.\w{2,4})\s+ or something like that. On the other hand,
when I display my Hungarian users a whois output full of English text,
it reminds me of the middle ages. Spam should be fought another way, not
creating mixed-up WHOIS data (which will not stop spammers anyway).

- Cs.

On Wed, 22 Jan 2003 11:42:55 +0100, Csongor Fagyal wrote:


[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:



�I've sucessfully written a Whois Parser which I maintain to this day
�.... Thanks to all the idiot spammers who mine Whois for email
�addresses I have found the following,

�1) To make Whois Parsing very difficult Several registrars dynamically
�change,

�a) the Whois field prefixes b) the order that Whois sections appear
�(tech first one time then reg the next time)
�c) the actual formating of a fields contents (!)

�2) Several registrars will temporarily block your IP after just a very
�few Whois accesses.
�So, from experiance, I can say writing a Whois parser these days is
�*VERY* difficult!


I say it's the 21st century, and you cannot get XML WHOIS output. That's
just nonsense.

- Cs.











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