Is the domain I'm acquiring tainted by its past life as a spam source?

December 4, 2005 6:58 PM

I've found a domain name I want to acquire from its current owner, and it looks like I may be able to do so. The IP address at which the domain resides is listed in a spam blacklist database. If I acquire the name and give it a new IP address, I assume that particular problem goes away. What's the best place, though, to check and see if the domain name itself is widely considered to be a spam source? Should I consider the IP listing to sully the domain -- am I buying a potential Superfund site?

I did look up the domain's pagerank at several different sites which claim to offer pagerank checking tools, and they all listed the pagerank as 1/10. I know that PR0 would be a big problem; how about PR1?

Thanks much.

posted by precipice to technology (5 comments total)

I've never heard of a spam blacklist that uses domain names; they all go by IP addresses. Because of the way DNS works it's impossible to get an authoritative "this IP address is this domain," and when a spam source connects to another mail server the only information the receiving server knows for sure is the IP address of the spam source. So if you point the domain to your own server (or to a mail server that's not a spam source), yeah, that blacklist problem should become a thing of the past.
posted by kindall at 7:02 PM on December 4, 2005

The SURBL (Spam URI Realtime Blocklists) uses the URLs in the message body. Other spam filtering engines use something similar - vipul's razor (sometimes used in SpamAssassin) for instance uses URLs as one of its fingerprinting algorithms.

It's trivial to vary the directory and file names per email, so usually the part that the spammer has to pay to change (the domain) is emphasized.

I don't know how much of the value of the domain is tied to your ability to send mail to people with URLs to it in the body, but it might be difficult to track down all the different spam filtering systems that do this (including secret proprietory ones! Gmail for instance uses their own home grown filter, I believe.)

FWIW, I work for Cloudmark, where I have written a URL extractor so we can filter spam with it.
posted by aubilenon at 7:44 PM on December 4, 2005

Oh, I forgot to say anything actually helpful!

I would say it depends on the timeline of your anticpated use of the domain. You may find emails mentioning your domain making some false positives at first, though this will of course decrease over time. I am sure there's a wide variance in how long it takes the blacklists to start trusting you again. If you email me ([e-mail]) with your domain, I can tell you at least how eggregious that domain's email abuse history is.
posted by aubilenon at 7:49 PM on December 4, 2005

Okay, I can't find your domain on any hostname-based blacklists. The IP which is currently associated with it IS in SORBS, but that's just the IP which you would change when you registered the domain.

Also, it's not on Google groups on any of the abuse lists. I don't think you'll have any problems caused by former spam from thas address.

Good luck with your new project!
posted by aubilenon at 11:22 AM on December 5, 2005

Thanks much for the help, both of you!
posted by precipice at 11:40 AM on December 5, 2005