[RFCI-Discuss] .NU considered harmful

[Jeff Makey]

I see that the .NU top-level domain already has a whois listing, but
today I noticed that there is a pair of wildcard A records for *.NU.
The reason they did this, of course, is to intercept HTTP connections
to non-existent .NU domains and to offer the chance to register them.
However, this defeats sendmail's sanity check that a sender's domain
must exist because no SMTP server is listening on either of the two IP
addresses.

Spammers do not seem to have noticed this yet, but when they start
abusing this "feature" it will encourage people to block the .NU TLD
entirely.

The correct RFCI response to this would be to list *.NU in the DSN,
postmaster, & abuse zones and then whitelist real domains that ask to
be delisted, but that would be a lot of effort.  Is there a precedent
for this situation?

                          :: Jeff Makey
                             jeff@sdsc.edu