ARIN WHOIS for leads

[jcurran at arin.net (John Curran)]

On Jul 26, 2013, at 4:34 PM, Jimmy Hess <mysidia at gmail.com> wrote:

> If someone studies that and finds there is a correlation to spam based
> on WHOIS listing alone,
> then perhaps....

No study has been conducted, but we do receive a small number of complaints 
each year about email contact information being solicited in cases were the 
email address is exclusively used on IP address blocks and nowhere else. 
(Often, the culprits are network equipment vendors or technical recruiters)

When we receive such, we send a nasty letter indicating violation of the 
Whois terms of use.  Most companies seem to pay attention to this, but then 
again, it's generally been a misguided individual at an otherwise legitimate 
enterprise causing the problem, as opposed to typical bulk email harvesting 
operation.

> In other words:   for starters,  assume the number of  "bad actors" is
> small,  and   let the community  pressure them  and their peers to
> retaliate,      before    diminishing the average usefulness of WHOIS
> to everyone,   (which restricting access to a small number of users
> does).

I believe we can arrange to publicly post our notices of violation; 
let me look into this option.

Thanks!
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN