Several years ago when I was developing an anti-SPAM appliance I banged my head against the wall because of Vipul’s Razor2. For those of you who aren’t familiar, the short version is that it’s an anti-spam tool that checksums messages that people mark as spam and then allows you to check your messages against a database of known spam checksums. I had several list disucssions back then with Vipul and others about how Razor had become completely ineffective because of the current implementation. Again, the short of it was that it was marking stuff that CLEARLY shouldn’t be SPAM as such. I took Razor2 out of our software permanently.

Here we are 5 years later. A few months ago I enabled Razor2 on my own mail server. This morning it marked a personal email from an affiliate manager that wasn’t even close to any kind of form-email as SPAM.

I’m shocked and appalled that Razor2 still sucks just as much as it did 5 years ago.

Can anyone get me an invite/approval to Amazon SimpleDB?

Then you’ll need to attend the
Internet Marketer’s charity party. It’s a great cause, and to do my part for charity, I will only answer technical questions at the party. See you there.

Finally got my big block 468 fired up today running Megasquirt. Can’t wait to drive this monster. The video just doesn’t do the sound justice.

For one of the coolest features of our Tools project I needed to be able to accurately determine domain availability. Here’s what I came up with:

$domain_ext = array(
‘.com’ => array(’whois.crsnic.net’,'No match for’),
‘.net’ => array(’whois.crsnic.net’,'No match for’),
‘.biz’ => array(’whois.biz’,'Not found’),
‘.mobi’ => array(’whois.dotmobiregistry.net’, ‘NOT FOUND’),
‘.tv’ => array(’whois.nic.tv’, ‘No match for’),
‘.in’ => array(’whois.inregistry.net’, ‘NOT FOUND’),
‘.info’ => array(’whois.afilias.net’,'NOT FOUND’),
‘.co.uk’ => array(’whois.nic.uk’,'No match’),
‘.co.ug’ => array(’wawa.eahd.or.ug’,'No entries found’),
‘.or.ug’ => array(’wawa.eahd.or.ug’,'No entries found’),
‘.nl’ => array(’whois.domain-registry.nl’,'is free’),
‘.ro’ => array(’whois.rotld.ro’,'No entries found for the selected’),
‘.com.au’ => array(’whois.ausregistry.net.au’,'No Data Found’),
‘.ca’ => array(’whois.cira.ca’, ‘AVAIL’),
‘.org.uk’ => array(’whois.nic.uk’,'No match’),
‘.name’ => array(’whois.nic.name’,'No match’),
‘.us’ => array(’whois.nic.us’,'Not found’),
‘.ac.ug’ => array(’wawa.eahd.or.ug’,'No entries found’),
‘.ne.ug’ => array(’wawa.eahd.or.ug’,'No entries found’),
‘.sc.ug’ => array(’wawa.eahd.or.ug’,'No entries found’),
‘.ws’ => array(’whois.website.ws’,'No Match’),
‘.be’ => array(’whois.ripe.net’,'FREE’),
‘.com.cn’ => array(’whois.cnnic.cn’,'no matching record’),
‘.net.cn’ => array(’whois.cnnic.cn’,'no matching record’),
‘.org.cn’ => array(’whois.cnnic.cn’,'no matching record’),
‘.no’ => array(’whois.norid.no’,'no matches’),
‘.se’ => array(’whois.nic-se.se’,'not found’),
‘.nu’ => array(’whois.nic.nu’,'NO MATCH for’),
‘.com.tw’ => array(’whois.twnic.net’,'No Found’),
‘.net.tw’ => array(’whois.twnic.net’,'No Found’),
‘.org.tw’ => array(’whois.twnic.net’,'No Found’),
‘.cc’ => array(’whois.nic.cc’,'No match’),
‘.nl’ => array(’whois.domain-registry.nl’,'is free’),
‘.pl’ => array(’whois.dns.pl’,'No information about’),
‘.pt’ => array(’whois.dns.pt’,'no match’),
‘.org’ => array(’whois.pir.org’,'NOT FOUND’)
);

If I had time, I’d add a 3rd field which would be the response when the domain IS available.