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The Perils of an .xyz Domain

spotvirtual.com

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Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#211

Post by thayne »

weeblewobble wrote: post #203
thayne wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually worse than that. It isn't blocked because of the sender or recipient, but because of the content . That would be like the postal service reading your mail and deciding that because of an address in the text of a letter, it shouldn't be delivered.

Amusing analogy. The postal service's unwillingness or inability to do just that has severely damaged their utility. If the USPS had a junk-filtering option I'd sign up tonight. Perversely, the postal system seems to embrace junk mail (e.g. if you sign up for address forwarding the USPS sends you a fat envelope full of junk mail as a "confirmation")

I wouldn't. I mean sure, it would be nice not to get so much junk mail. But I personally don't think it is worth the risk of important mail like bills, tax info, new credit cards, etc. as accidentally getting flagged as spam. It also increases how much you have to trust the postal service.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#212

Post by fortyseven »

As a guy who's blog and email consists of .xyz domains, I can only say two or three times in ad many years has it ever been a problem (that I'm aware of, at least), and then it was a website not letting me create an account using it for email.

I suspect I'm either lucky, or something.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#213

Post by Diesel555 »

> we would occasionally get feedback from users and prospects that the .xyz domain felt unprofessional

I had a .xyz domain. I thought it was easier, the domain was short to type.

I was completely wrong. I asked a few non-technical friends. They said they would never use my site because of the .xyz, it felt like a spam site. I redid the site on .net with a longer domain name - much better results.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#214

Post by userbinator »

we would occasionally get feedback from users and prospects that the .xyz domain felt unprofessional and that they would prefer to use an app with a different URL. This was surprising feedback, as we did not believe that, beyond the initial discoverability of our product, the domain itself would create this type of impact.

Not surprising at all to me, who has used the Internet for over two decades --- to be honest, all these new and unusual TLDs, whenever they show up in search results, are almost entirely sites filled with SEO spam and similarly useless content. It's nearly an instinct to ignore them at this point.

(As for the company, it's too bad virtualspot.com and virtual-spot.com were already taken; spotvirtual.com looks weird, but at least doesn't have the negative connotations of an even weirder TLD.)

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#215

Post by bogidon »

thayne wrote: post #211
weeblewobble wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amusing analogy. The postal service's unwillingness or inability to do just that has severely damaged their utility. If the USPS had a junk-filtering option I'd sign up tonight. Perversely, the postal system seems to embrace junk mail (e.g. if you sign up for address forwarding the USPS sends you a fat envelope full of junk mail as a "confirmation")

I wouldn't. I mean sure, it would be nice not to get so much junk mail. But I personally don't think it is worth the risk of important mail like bills, tax info, new credit cards, etc. as accidentally getting flagged as spam. It also increases how much you have to trust the postal service.

I like to chime in with this one when possible (due to a deep resentment for credit card offer spam). In case you didn’t know, you can opt out of the credit industry’s vast marketing machinery.

It’s a bit obtuse, as you’d expect from the bureaus, but I am thankful for this bit of regulation: https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/prescreened-credit-and...

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#216

Post by mdavis6890 »

krono wrote: post #26
humanistbot wrote: post #2

> One surprising side effect of having a .xyz domain is that the mere inclusion of .xyz inside of a text message will result in a silent delivery failure for many providers. This is wild to me. Tested it out myself and I couldn't send an SMS with a spot.xyz link to/from Google Voice T-Mobile. And no "failed delivery" notice either, just a silent failure. And yet I still get so many texts that are obviously spam or ph…

Blocking of messages/emails and blanket email server/domain/extension blacklisting is the same as a postal service not delivering mail to or from a particular entity/street/town. Doing so silently and without a valid and case-specific reason should not be legally allowed. Edit: Added "street/town" to analogy, and "case-specific" before reason

The problem is that just receiving the message is in-and-of itself bad for the end user. It's not the volume you think (assuming the other poster is accurate about relative volumes) - it's far, far more. Imagine getting 1000 SMS/day that all have a "spam" warning attached, or worse, no warning at all. You'd just stop getting any value from SMS at all, and ignore it.

I mean, going back to the postal service - even the weekly pile of "here, throw this away for me." dead trees we receive (in the US) is mildly irritating. Imagine THAT x 1000!

I'm grateful for the silent block in this case. I mean, my social security number is being canceled, I'm about to be arrested by the IRS, the FBI found a suspicious package with my personal information in it and my car warranty (didn't know I had one) is up for renewal. And that's just this morning. What more can I stand? One of these days I'll press 1 out of desperation...

Also I hate govt/big-corp censorship as much as the next person, but none of this seems remotely political or ideological. And consider the alternative.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#217

Post by unethical_ban »

teddyh wrote: post #81
unethical_ban wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll find I agree that the concept of silently spam filtering on TLD of a link is something that pisses me off. You'll also find that calling this "censorship" as if it has to do with government action, or that it has to do with the content of the specific site, is ludicrous. This is incompetence, not malice.

Censorship is far from not limited to government action. I see this misconception a lot, and I believe it comes from Americans misinterpreting their first amendment.

I figured that might come up, but censorship whether govt. or not is seen as "oppression due to opinion".

Over-aggressive TLD spam filtering is just bad logic from infosec employees.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#218

Post by Thorrez »

waiseristy wrote: post #67

The XYZ TLD is a hotbed for spam due to it's very low fee's for purchase / renewal. The registrar was, at one point, selling massive blocks of xyz domains to foreign squatters and spam artists for quick cash. No wonder it's become blacklisted by email/cell providers. Can anyone try `abc.xyz`? and see if that fails to send? It would be very typical for our corporate overlords to be omitted from our spam censorship fil…

>The text including the .xyz link is notably absent. Until I realized what was happening, I would sometimes have some very strange text exchanges with people whenever I would mention my company or my email address. Once we switched to spotvirtual.com, this issue went away.

>Ironically, Google Voice also has the same behavior with abc.xyz.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#219

Post by Twisell »

cortesoft wrote: post #172
Twisell wrote: post #80

Got a nice .xyz domain mainly for mail with SPF,DKIM correctly set up and tested against multiple validators. No big issues so far except for the HR department of a potential new gig which can painlessly mail me@mydomain.xyz about job interviews BUT never get my replies back. I don't who to blame more in this mess: - Me for playing smartass instead of using a @gmail.com because they impose the rules so everybody comp…

> (maybe my reluctance to encourage this broken system explain my recklessness) This is a great example of a Collective Action problem. Everyone would be better off if we could break the gmail domination of email policy, but as an individual you will have zero effect on gmail's dominance and only suffer the pain of not being a part of the system.

And I would love to see EFF a little more involved in that matter. If things continues to goes downhill this far how many years left before big players decide to outright reject mail that doesn't come from a curated whitelist of their own?

The responsible answer should be IRL legal actions against real spamers because they'll always adapt to new arbitrary protocol rules faster than legitimate users, it's their jobs!

Even from an environmental standpoint I get tired of user-shaming articles about why you should delete your email for the planet. Maybe as engineers our duty is somewhat to propose a new version of the mail protocol that doesn't allow this much crap to fly around in the first place. Current solutions seems to revolve around the concept of "everybody should duck and cover if anything is suspicious" thus blocking some legitimate message that no sane human would reject should they be in charge instead of a basic AI.

PS: I'm not suggesting by any mean that you should punish any human being with manual moderation.

PS:PS: Maybe a NGO whitelist system is a solution, I'm just fearfull about which entity will end up with such power. But actually domain filtering is already kind of an implicit unpredictable non shared whitelist build on top of ICAAN register... So here we are already...

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#220

Post by dcow »

mdavis6890 wrote: post #216
krono wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blocking of messages/emails and blanket email server/domain/extension blacklisting is the same as a postal service not delivering mail to or from a particular entity/street/town. Doing so silently and without a valid and case-specific reason should not be legally allowed. Edit: Added "street/town" to analogy, and "case-specific" before reason

The problem is that just receiving the message is in-and-of itself bad for the end user. It's not the volume you think (assuming the other poster is accurate about relative volumes) - it's far, far more. Imagine getting 1000 SMS/day that all have a "spam" warning attached, or worse, no warning at all. You'd just stop getting any value from SMS at all, and ignore it. I mean, going back to the postal service - even the…

Without any indication? How about

   WE THINK THIS MESSAGE IS SPAM
   _tap to read anyway_
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