Hi MIchael! I totally understand what you’re saying. I get it 100%. But your math doesn’t quite add up for me.
There are 1,239 gTLDs. The SpamAssassin source* blocks just *22* of them. If you believe every new gTLD is garbage (and I get that!), why isn’t SpamAssassin automatically dinging, say, 1,200+ of them? Or put another way, why _these_ 22, and _only_ these 22, and not the rest? That’s the “science” I’m trying to understand! :) (And I’m still curious if there is any path of redemption for these 22. ) Best, Cabel Panic PS: In the future, believe me, we won’t pick any of the gTLDs in this list. It’s also possible we can just send email from panic.com which we’ve now owned for nearly 30 years, but I'm still really curious! * Assuming I’m reading this right at https://apache.googlesource.com/spamassassin/+/refs/tags/sa-update_3.4.4_20220326083106/rulesrc/sandbox/pds/20_ntld.cf > On Jan 15, 2024, at 4:35 PM, Michael Orlitzky <mich...@orlitzky.com> wrote: > > On Mon, 2024-01-15 at 15:58 -0800, Cabel Sasser wrote: >> >> Can anyone help me understand “the science”? And how these domains are >> chosen for such a heavy punishment? > > What you're facing is essentially an economic problem. Everyone knows > dot-com, and to a lesser extent dot-net and dot-org. But everything > else is junk: if you're the fifth guy to try to buy example.com, you're > probably not who people are looking for when they type www.example.com > into their web browsers. The other TLDs are also much harder for people > to remember if they see it on a commercial. As a result, dot-info, dot- > biz, and everything after have always been considered knock-offs. > > When the wave of new gTLDs hit, the value of each successive one became > diluted even further. By the time you get to dot-date, you're at what > should be, like, somebody's 40th choice for a domain name. How to you > sell that? At a huge fucking discount, if you want anyone to buy it! > > That's one half of your economic problem. > > Now imagine you're trying to block spammers by domain name, and there's > one particular set of domain names that they can get at a 90% discount > because nobody wants them otherwise. Regardless of how many legitimate > companies use those domains, the signal to noise ratio is going to be > crap. > > So, the other half of your economic problem is: how much money does it > cost me (as a recipient) to block dot-date, versus how much does it > cost me to not block it? We have customers who complain about spam and > customers who complain about blocked messages. It's a pretty easy > calculation for a recipient to make, and the result for me at least is > that it's less work (i.e. less expensive) to just block every new gTLD > and whitelist the few legitimate senders brave enough to live there.
