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Re: [Asrg] URL shorteners, spam and DNS

2011-08-22 13:11:29


On Mon, 22 Aug 2011, Martijn Grooten wrote:

URL shorteners (bit.ly, goo.gl, tinyurl.com etc.) have become popular in recent years for rather obvious reasons. They are being used by spammers for equally obvious reasons - both in email and on other platforms (e.g. Twitter).

A filter that checks URLs/domains against a blacklist will either miss the bad domains hidden behind the shorteners or, if they blacklist the shortener, find itself blocking legitimate messages. Do Not Use (third-party) URL Shorteners is sound advice to those sending email, but it's not going to stop random users from copying shortened URLs from Twitter or Facebook and pasting them into emails and shortened URLs are unlikely to stop featuring on Twitter.


Is there some reason the spam filter can't just send a head request to bit.ly and find out the destination URL? That wouldn't require any cooperation among the various parties to this potential transaction, and cooperation is always in short supply in this field.

Daniel Feenberg
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