back to article Men are officially the worst… top-level domain

The internet has a case of .men behaving badly, based on new data from international watchdog Spamhaus. In a listing of the top ten worst top-level domains compiled by Spamhaus, .men has come top, followed somewhat bizarrely by .GQ, which is the country code for Equatorial Guinea but also happens to be the name of a famous men …

  1. Amos1

    Throw in others and...

    you'll have what companies are also seeing. Start with .stream and .pw

    Some large companies are simply blocking all 1,000+ and allowing exceptions as needed. The new stuff is as big a cesspool as .info and .biz turned out to be. If you're a real company, don't even think about using .pro because the real "pros" have beat you to it.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Throw in others and...

      Personally I've found .date to be the worst, although sometimes it's difficult to tell amongst the swirling mass of turds that encompass .info, .work, .loan, .shop, ... Basically any of the pointless new TLDs.

      1. katrinab Silver badge

        Re: Throw in others and...

        Agree, .date is by far the worst for me, with .faith in second place.

        1. Chris King
          Holmes

          Re: Throw in others and...

          For me, it's .rocks, .shop, and .store. 100% spam, with no lumps of anything remotely like ham.

          The big boys who bought their brand-name TLD's don't seem to be using them, so hopefully they only bought them to prevent squatting.

      2. BillG
        IT Angle

        Re: Throw in others and...

        The company I worked for last year blacklisted any email from a TLD that was four letters or longer, except for .info. It was a very popular policy.

    2. John Lilburne

      Re: Throw in others and...

      True. When I cared, I blocked all signups to the company user forum from gmail, hotmail, and yahoo. Spammer signups dropped from 200+ per day to about a dozen a month. We made exceptions for genuine users (about 10 over a 4 year period).

  2. doublelayer Silver badge

    Is it too late to get rid of the new TLDs

    I don't think we need any of the new TLDs, and I'm not even sure why people are buying them. I can see a few cases for some things, usually geographic ones like .nyc or .london. Otherwise, the lists are full of domains that cost a ridiculous amount, thus virtually guaranteeing that nobody will use them, redundant names (.accountant and .accountants both exist because, you know, why not) and some that are now owned by corporations (.google? Why?). We don't need them. Delete them all.

    1. Mark 85

      Re: Is it too late to get rid of the new TLDs

      Not a bad idea except for the money angle. Dig deep and we find out why ICANN is fighting for the WhoIs and why they ignore the spam TLD's.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    .domains .IDon'tCare

    Some things are just crap through and through .domain names are one of them

  4. veti Silver badge

    I'm feeling left out

    I've never so much as seen an email from any of the new domains. As far as my inbox is concerned, the expansion ended with '.biz'.

    Serious proposal: is there anything to be lost by simply blackholing every TLD not registered before 2010?

    1. Dazed and Confused

      Re: I'm feeling left out

      Hmmm well I can't find any from .men, but acoording to my mail log I've had 6 from .date.

      So when I find enough time to be bored I'll have to work out how to get postfix to just block all these buggers.

    2. Phil Endecott

      Re: I'm feeling left out

      > is there anything to be lost by simply blackholing every TLD not registered before 2010?

      .scot has useful content, and was only registered in 2014.

      1. GerryMC

        Re: I'm feeling left out

        There are a few NZ businesses using the .kiwi TLD created in 2014, but there is really no real need for it - we survived with various second level domains under .nz for over 20 years.

      2. Pen-y-gors

        Re: I'm feeling left out

        ditto .cymru and .wales, of which I have a number, and register more quite regularly. None of my customers seem interested in .uk for some reason.

    3. jake Silver badge
      Pint

      Re: I'm feeling left out

      FWIW, back in 2004 I got inundated with spam. Worse than usual. Really pissed me off. After digging thru the logs[0], I decided to blackhole every TLD that didn't exist prior to 2000, with an easy to understand provision to whitelist exceptions for people who could make a case for accessing specific "new" TLDs. The policy has been in place ever since. Today, there are a total of 37 TLDs in the whitelist, and I haven't heard a single complaint from the userbase[1] in four or five years.

      Choices like this are hard to make, and YMMV. Beer seems to help, especially when explaining the situation to business owners. This round's on me.

      [0] perl is your friend ... no, really!

      [1] Friends, family, some businesses large and small, some schools large and small, a couple of non-profits, etc.

      1. Long John Brass
        Pirate

        Re: I'm feeling left out

        Running the one of the tarpit extensions is also great fun. Watching some dickhead running a dictionary attack against users in my @foo.com domain and knowing they are slowly exhausting their PORT pool brings smile to my cold dead heat.

        1. Alistair
          Windows

          Re: I'm feeling left out

          @LJB:

          Works well on ssh scan runs too.

      2. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Re: I'm feeling left out

        perl is your friend

        Nah. Perl is the dude I can just about tolerate, and call when I need someone to carry the other end of the sofa as we load it on the trailer.

        Awk is my friend. I've known awk a lot longer than I've known perl.

  5. Ole Juul

    so?

    If you get rid of some TLDs the people using them will just use other ones. Those people are not going to go away. It's probably better to have TLDs like .men so they don't pollute .com or other more common traditional ones.

    1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

      Re: so?

      Exactly. The new TLDs have all the spammers ? Good. That way we know what to block and no useful traffic will be lost in the shuffle.

      1. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: so?

        > The new TLDs have all the spammers?

        Yup. And I classify .biz and .info as new, let alone anything more recent.

    2. 's water music

      Re: so?

      yup, the 'new' gtlds are an even better heuristic for 'sites/emails with which I want nothing to do' than businesses with Facebook pages. I say keep them there

  6. -tim

    Run your own DNS servers

    If you run your own DNS server, don't use the typical root hints but use it for .com, .net, .org and country codes you care about. Then all the others just go away. It is amazing how much stuff gets blocked using this technique.

  7. FozzyBear
    Black Helicopters

    What are their metrics in classifying them as bad. If disservice to humanity is part of that then they missed

    .gov

    1. jake Silver badge

      I agree, but ...

      ... the metric is (usually) abuse OF the network, as opposed to abuse ON the network.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      The biggest abuse is that .gov and .edu seem to be occupied exclusively by entitled Americans who think their public authorities and educational establishments should have exclusive use of these worldwide domains.

      Let's knock them all down to gov.us and edu.us

  8. Herby

    An interesting idea...

    Maybe the new domains should only be listed in IPv6 space. Then we might get a handle on them.

    Just an idea, there was a thread a few days ago about IPv6 uptake, and this might "help".

  9. Pen-y-gors

    Serifs are goooooood...

    the third worst registry - .loan – with 59 per cent bad domains and a 6.22 index.

    I really hate sans-serif fonts - I read that as .Ioan not .loan. Couldn't work out why there was a TLD of .Ioan, but not .dafydd, .gareth, .mair, .lowri or .nia - and why anyone would fill it with badness. Most of the Ioans I know are really nice blokes.

    1. Martin an gof Silver badge

      Re: Serifs are goooooood...

      Most of the Ioans I know are really nice blokes.

      It's worse here, because my eldest is Ioan so I effectively default to reading "loan" as "Ioan" when there are no embellishments.

      Yes, he's a nice bloke. Most of the time...

      M.

    2. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: Serifs are goooooood...

      Most of the Ioans I know are really nice blokes.

      The Ioan I know oft loses both himself and friend. No sense of direction at all.

  10. TheVogon

    Wo.men maybe?

  11. Roj Blake Silver badge

    EastEnders

    I'm still waiting for all the EastEnders fan sites using .cotton domains.

    1. defiler

      Re: EastEnders

      Oof - it's too early for jokes as ropey as that! Still, well done.

      1. Roj Blake Silver badge

        Re: EastEnders

        Point taken, although I thought that the thread demanded it.

  12. Tim 11

    Is this even useful?

    What is the point in analyzing dodgy domains and sites by the TLD they are in? do punters generally think a .com is more likely to be legit than others?

    As far as I'm concerned the TLD is about as meaningful as the day-of-the-week it was registered as an indicator of whether the domain is likely to be dodgy or not.

    1. Richard 22

      Re: Is this even useful?

      I think the point is that tlds are operated by multiple companies, some of which may have a laxer attitude towards not kicking known spammers off. Hence some tlds may end up with more bad domains. Still, the approach of simply blocking such tlds is rather unfair to the businesses who are operating legitimately and have got domains with those tlds because they make for logical or more easily remembered domain names.

      1. jake Silver badge

        Re: Is this even useful?

        "simply blocking such tlds is rather unfair to the businesses"

        No more unfair than people not visiting shops built in a dodgy part of town. It's up to you to make sure your new business address is in a "nice" part of TehIntraWebTubes, not in a slum that everybody shuns.

      2. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Re: Is this even useful?

        Still, the approach of simply blocking such tlds is rather unfair to the businesses who are operating legitimately and have got domains with those tlds because they make for logical or more easily remembered domain names.

        I don't think it is. A business chooses to brand itself as part of its advertising - it's a way to attract customers. If that brand proves counterproductive, that's the fault of the business.

        A shop named "Crap Pizza" would be memorable, and in the case of many pizza chains logical. That doesn't mean it'd be a good branding move, or that it'd be "unfair" if, say, local Chamber-of-Commerce types declined to highlight it in their list of local attractions.

    2. katrinab Silver badge

      Re: Is this even useful?

      I blocked .date this morning, because I've been getting an increasing number of emails getting through the spam filter, and every single one of them was from that tld. I've never seen a legitimate business use it, not even the dating sites it was intended for.

  13. Neon Teepee
    Paris Hilton

    .AU

    To get a .com.au you have to have a company registered in the country. Not a total turn off but it costs AU$500(ish) to set up a company so its quite a good deterrent.

    Why Paris - We aren't seeing enough of her

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