[7402]

By posting someone's e-mail address in a very public web site, you are just making it that much more accessible to spammers. It is easier to spider news.ycombinator.com than to do so for many whois repositories, some of which explicitly try to block their records from spammers.

But even more importantly, as a matter of simple politeness, it is a good rule to honor someone's choice about how much they reveal about themselves on-line, even if you possess the technical knowledge to dig deeper.

We're talking about rudeness vs. courtesy here. The world will not be a better place if your algorithm is simply to find out as much as you can about someone and then broadcast it in as public a fashion as possible without regard to the person's wishes.

[IgorPartola]

Do the Whois databases actually try to block spammers? Any idea how they do it? I also wonder if all the websites out there that allow a view into the Whois data, end up caching it (e.g.: http://whois.domaintools.com/mta.me). If then Google and Coral Cache crawl these this data is permanently accessible.

[Travis]

It is very explicitly and obviously against their terms of service if you run a whois from a cli. The first lines returned: "You are not authorized to access or query our Whois database through the use of electronic processes that are high-volume and automated except as reasonably necessary to register domain names or modify existing registrations."

Perhaps you can argue against the effectiveness of their countermeasures, but from an legal standpoint, they do not authorize that activity. I take that to mean that they probably implement some technical countermeasures, but I cannot speak to their level of sophistication.

[Natsu]

> It is very explicitly and obviously against their terms of service if you run a whois from a cli.

You're absolutely right, but I've yet to meet a spammer who cared about anybody's ToS and I know for a fact that they only put that up there after a bunch of spammers abused the heck out of the service.