ASCR REPLY: Response from the Anti-Spam Community Registry
Greetings, With the conclusion of this public comment forum, the Anti-Spam Community Registry, on behalf of the .Mail application team would like to thank ICANN for allowing the public to comment. We are pleased at the response our proposal has received, both positive and negative, and look forward to addressing the issues going forward. We would like to take this opportunity to address some of the late-posted issues. "Fu" <fu@xxxxxx> wrote in Subject: Comments on the new .mail TLD proposal >The technology already exists to achieve the same result and it doesn't >require a monopoly to oversee it. > >The same effect can be achieved by requiring that all incoming email is >signed by a known, trusted key. True, the ideas for digital-certificates, signing email, signing servers, and the like have been around for quite some time. Yet nothing has come of it due to the large effort needed to restructure the world's entire email system to work with a trusted-key, trusted-signer protocol. Other technologies exist to stop spam and verify senders, but they have similar issues in that they radically change the SMTP protocol or do away with it entirely. These things will not happen any time soon so we feel that we must work within the parameters that are currently available. The .Mail proposal does this. Andrew D Kirch <trelane@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in Subject: .mail TLD >The exorbitant costs to register a .mail domain is prohibitive to it's >successful use. Further it is incredibly exclusionary on countries and >entities which are not able to afford such costs. In fact, it is people and companies in countries not in the "first world" that have been lobbying for a system just like .Mail. Unless one is trying to send mail from Korea, China, Brazil, and may other "spam troubled" nations to N. America or Europe, one probably does not understand the number of recipients who just refuse to accept email from these regions based solely on their origination. Their current "costs" of email non-deliverability and costs of oursoucing email to "western" hosts is larger than any domain usage fee. >The price is too high, the solution is already in place, "caller ID" and >"TXT records" are there for all domains "Caller-ID" (by Microsoft) or DNS "TXT record" systems such as SPF, DomainKeys and others are sender authentication technologies (SAT), they do not give any idea to the recipient if the email coming in is spam or not, anyone can set up a SAT system, spammers included. We do thank Andrew for posting a follow-up statement of regret about some of the statements he expressed in his posting. The AHBL and Spamhaus may differ on a few issues as to the extent of blocklisting non-spamming areas of the internet to try force better behavior, but most of the two system's aims are the same and we doubt .Mail will happen the effectiveness of any blocklist system in any great way. In the follow-up statement Andrew wonders why the ICANN comment forum was the first he'd heard of the .Mail proposal. We're not sure as to why, as the proposal by itself, and in combination with the other sTLD proposals, was covered by just about every major on-line, and several print news organizations. It is to note that the Anti-Spam Community Registry has not done any advertising at this time. Jim Watson <ngd2000@xxxxxxxx> wrote in Subject: dot mail is good idea BUT small nonprofit should be exempt from $2000 dollar charge ! >They need such an ability to help them with legitimate newsletter and fund >raising activities in mail to there members and client communities. Non-profits and other such organizations may be able to pool their out bound email services under a single .Mail domain. Do keep in mind that the costs associated in vetting non-profit organizations is the same as for any other applicant as spammers will claim they are "non-profit" if they thought it would help them get approved. Additionally, as we have indicated, we expect that the cost will be less than the maximum proposed to ICANN. dom-sec@xxxxxxxxx wrote in Subject: Comments from JPNIC Domain Name Policy Study Group >Japan Network Information Center, JPNIC, has organized a study group >called "JPNIC Domain Name Policy Study Group" . We can't comment much on this other that to wonder why based on the comments put forth, a study group called "JPNIC Domain Name Policy Study Group" did not study either the .Mail ICANN proposal or the .Mail FAQ at the www.Spamhaus.org website. Every statement is based on a misunderstanding of the .Mail proposal, and is written in the first-person, suggesting that this study group is a single individual? AccuSpam <support@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in Subject: We hope .Mail is approved... >We hope .Mail is approved, so that our criticisms will be given a chance >to be proven. The worst possible thing that can happen for AccuSpam and >myself, is for .Mail is be denied and then people accuse of us of trying >to protect our own interests. Thank you for this. As we've stated, we do value your opinion and everyone's postings. The system's design is sound and we do hope to be given a chance for it to prove itself as a way to insure the flow of "non-spam email"; as you must know, non-spam email is sadly the ever smaller percentage of email that travels on the internet. The Anti-Spam Community Registry Team |