Introducing Cloudflare Registrar

1. Have had them turn off private WHOIS for all (hundreds of) domains "by accident".

2. I haven't figured out a way to export a list of domains after their UI revamp some years ago.

3. At some point they started setting DNS records for newly purchased domains to their landing page with a 30 minute TTL, which makes setting up something on the fly impossible, unless you use their API:

4. Their API is flaky at best. I wrote a script to register domains and set NS records and was forced to write a loop to set NS records up to 10 times until they got set properly.

In the worst case, where you have some unusual, specific need that hasn't been designed for, you can -- quite easily -- easily create your own policy daemon [2] (even in Perl; see the example) and/or milters [3].

> I wouldn't say that. perl is about the best scripting language IMO, and is available on all systems.

Oh, I agree; I was mostly teasing. I first started using Perl c. 1995 (and later, for writing CGI scripts, when CGI became a thing) and it is still the scripting language I reach for 95% of the time for basic sysadmin stuff.

> I wrote my own spam filter because I want to have full control over how I deal with spam, and generally it works very well.

I certainly can't fault you for that. Take a look at the greylist.pl script that ships with Postfix. It is an example of a policy daemon that implements greylisting (not meant for production; for greylisting, use postscreen instead). It's been several years ago but, after looking at that, I was able to implement my first policy daemon (which reached out to a MySQL server) in about 20 minutes and, after some testing, put it into production shortly after that. It's amazingly simple.

I'm not sure what MTA you are currently using but I would certainly recommend looking into Postfix. Back in the 90s, I was a hardcore, bigoted sendmail guy ("Give me sendmail or give me death!") but at some point I started looking into Postfix and have never looked back. Among other things, I manage mail systems at $work (an ISP) and I'm "very anti-spam". I occasionally need/want to do some unusual things policy-wise (WRT accepting or rejecting mail) and Postfix can itself handle 95% of it. For the other 5%, I tweak AMaViS or write my own policy daemons.

N.B.: My personal mail server (currently) runs on FreeBSD, where I use OpenBSD's "spamd" [4] for greylisting. Personally, I prefer and use that over postscreen (it stops upwards of 90% of remote mail systems from even getting to talk to the "real" MTA!) but on my (CentOS) Linux-based mail systems, I now just use postscreen (previously, I had a "standalone" OpenBSD box running "spamd" sitting in front of Barracuda appliances (as a transparent SMTP proxy). postscreen is really simple to get up and running -- and even more so if you're already using Postfix! -- and a very minimal, basic postscreen configyration will stop the majority of "zombies", hijacked PCs, blacklisted hosts, etc., from getting through to your actual SMTP server.

[0]: http://www.postfix.org/postscreen.8.html

[1]: http://www.postfix.org/POSTSCREEN_README.html

[2]: http://www.postfix.org/SMTPD_POLICY_README.html

[3]: http://www.postfix.org/MILTER_README.html

[4]: https://www.openbsd.org/spamd/index.html

Equating cloudflare tech with nazi bouncers, and killing. Needing to be used to shutdown sites.

with things like this: >> Cloudflare has built “edge servers” – data centres that store content locally. There are 30 in Europe, including one in London and one in Manchester. The British government cannot regulate the worldwide web, but it could enforce the law in Britain. The anti-fascists at Hope not Hate begged ministers to make Cloudflare’s British operations comply with anti-Nazi legislation.

>> Cloudflare, by contrast, is enabling men who want to kill, not argue.

There was a time when the tech was not easily understood, and the argument of dumb pipes was kind of legit. It seems that time is over, in no small part because tech has not been sticking to their principals (imho).