Comments regarding the FOA

[PSI-USA Hostmaster <hostmaster@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

ICANN forces the industry for the first time to use FOA's.
(Please correct me, if I'm wrong.)

The FOA's should be sent by mail to these parties:

- Former/current Registrant of record
- The Registrars

This could cause an impact for our whole business.

Since a Registrant must confirm the mail, and before
this happens, the Gainging Registrar is not allowed
to start the transfer, the process is based on
e-mails (!!!).

Since it is the first time ICANN forces to use Standard
Forms that everyone could see at the ICANN homepage, this
is different to current behaviours.

Today, Registrars are free to design their mails to the
"parties".  With the new Policy, the industry must switch
to offical FOA's.


THE PROBLEM

Assume some bad guy that takes this FOA, put some words like
"VIAGRA, PENIS, FREE SEX..." inside.
He takes this mail an sends 100.000 mails to some big mailservers
like AOL, MSN, Hotmail and Yahoo. (It is to mention that the
Registrants involved in this process have their accounts often at those
companies, but the impact works for all modern mailservers.)

All big mailservers today learn automatically what SPAM is,
and they will treat such a mail as SPAM. Blacklists will be
updated immediately, worldwide. Within 48 days, most of all
mailservers are up to date and know how to treat this mail
(the FOA!!!). It is SPAM.

We made local tests, our Spam Assasin (some of the most
used programms for Anti-SPAM in Linux...) drops this mails.

Remember: If no FOA's are received by the Registrant, no
Registrant could give the ACK to start the transfer. Since
mailservers/spamfilters drop such mails, the business
stops.


THE QUESTION

How can ICANN guarantee that that the FOA's could be received
by the former/current Registrants?


THE RESOLUTION

ICANN can not impact our business with such a process.
The FOA's could be misused by everyone.

From my perpective, ICANN has to

Change the Policy, that every Registrar is allowed to use
forms they want and the FOA's could be treated as example
only. This makes it much more difficult for someone to
misuse all of these forms. If every registrar is free to construct
the text for the mail, it would be hard work for a hacker to
impact all mailservers with all possible forms.


Best regards

Curd Bems



--
With best regards,
TEAM PSI-USA / Hostmaster
_______________________________________________
PSI-USA Inc., DNS Service Center (Hostmaster)
Maximilianstrasse 6, 93047 Regensburg, Germany
Curd Bems, hostmaster@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Tel. +49 941 59559-235  Fax. +49 941 59559-457