Blocked an entire TLD for the spam it produced

There is a tremendous amount of spam circulating 24/7 and domain investors often receive hundreds of emails daily.

In recent years I’ve identified the two primary reasons unsolicited email has increased in volume:

• Cheap, throwaway domain names, and
• Spam servers hiding behind free proxy DNS services

With that in mind, the type of spam that I’ve been receiving for the past three years can be sourced from domain names registered at NameCheap. They seem to reach agreements with a number of registries that discount gTLDs as low as a dollar per domain, or they are willing to take a hit and attract new customers.

Either way, the end result is that spammers register dozens of cheap domains and proceed with step two: using Cloudflare as a free proxy DNS service.

The combination provides spammers with cheap domains, mostly random keywords, that are hiding their web host behind the Cloudflare DNS.

Time and again I’ve reported to NameCheap dozens of domain batches that spit out spam relentlessly.

NameCheap wants me to open a ticket every time I receive such an influx of emails. Let’s just say by giving them the domains I’ve done 90% of the work for them, and I have better things to do with my time as I’m not on the NameCheap payroll. As long as they offer cheap domains below the regular fee schedule, they will continue to attract spammers.

Cloudflare expects individual reports as well and in my opinion they are sitting on a huge pile of spam by allowing freshly registered domains to use their free service. Surely, Cloudflare expects some of its legitimate free users to convert to paid services, but they are attracting a lot of systematic spammers this way. Solution: prevent domains that are less than 60 days old from using the free proxy DNS service.

In the end, I gave up sharing with NameCheap and Cloudflare the domains that spam me. I blocked the entire TLD that had been sending hundreds of emails every day in recent weeks. It’s unfortunate that no more legitimate emails from .CYOU will reach me, and I finally get to say “see you” to spam.