As we’ve said outright and intimated over the years, the battle against spam is never-ending.
One thing we have noticed in the last year or so is that a huge amount of spam comes from certain TLDs (top-level domains), but blocking entire TLDs is a bit radical. We have generally avoided doing so, but the time has come to block the following two alternative TLDs:
- sa.com, and
- za.com
These are simply two regular domains, but they are owned by CentralNIC (now “Team Internet” because they can’t make up their minds about how they want to be known) who market them as TLDs — just as NinerNet markets the zam.co domain as an alternative TLD (actually, SLD, second-level domain) for Zambia. Therefore, you can buy the sub-domain your-name.sa.com and your-name.za.com. CentralNIC doesn’t seem to make even a cursory attempt to stop spammers from using their domains to spam, so we now block all messages sent from all addresses on those two “pseudo” TLDs — e.g., spammer1@spammer1.sa.com and spammer2@spammer2.za.com. We’re considering blocking the .top TLD as well, for the same reason, but we haven’t yet. You can certainly block entire TLDs from reaching your email addresses as well, if you feel this rather extreme move will benefit your domain.
If you happen to correspond with a legitimate correspondent on one of those alternative TLDs, please contact NinerNet support and we will work with you to address the problem you will now have communicating with them.
Thanks for your attention to this matter.
