Evening all On Sat, 15 Jan 2000, Patrick O' Brien wrote:
FWIW, our experience is that the choice of our email address has not been raised as a major barrier before, either by Name Holders or through the ISP Channel.
I'd be interested to know how many members of nznog saw the request to join NewZ-Flash(a)domainz.net.nz, thought "bah, gratuitous use of mid-word capitalisation, more marketing puff from Domainz", and chose not to join. I know I did, and I'm grateful to Joe for filtering the content of NewZ-Flash(a)domainz.net.nz and passing the interesting bits onto nznog. Had the list been named domainz-annouce(a)domainz.net.nz, or domainz-ops(a)domainz.net.nz, I'd almost certainly have joined the new mailing list. Now I'm not saying that's rational, you shouldn't judge a book by it's colour, and all that, but that's the thought process I went through. The rest of the email is a digression on the (in)accuracy of the numbers offered by Patrick. Please ignore if you've got anything better to do. <stuff deleted for brevity>
In the .nz Register, we've got just under 3,200 discrete "Technical contact" addresses. Here's a list of the top 25 Technical Contact "user names" (I mean the fields before the @..),
USER COUNT --------- --------- soa 126 HostMaster 95 webmaster 66 support 64 admin 54 dns 49 info 39 postmaster 30 Chris 23 paul 20 tech 19 steve 18 john 18 andrew 17 noc 15 domain 15 craig 13 richard 12 mike 11 james 11 daniel 11 registry 10 nic 10 simon 10 domains 10
Let's see if my long forgotten stats 101 is up to this: 3200 tech contact email addresses 29966 total .nz domains, according to Mark Davies. Only 776 domains are covered by the top 25 listed above, so 29190 domains are shared out amongst another 3175 tech contact email addresses. By my reckoning, that's over 9 domains per addressee, on average, but with a maximum of 10, or they'd have made the list above. This seems hugely implausible to me - if the 3178 addressees with 10 or less domains are distributed evenly between 1 and 10 domains, then there is only room for 17490 domains, which is way short of the count listed on Mark's page. They'd have to be massively skewed towards 10 and away from 1 to allow for 29190 domains. Somebody with a better grasp of standard deviations can comment on whether this is statistically plausible. Stepping back from my inadequate statistical analysis, lets look at specifics. nic(a)citylink.co.nz, nic(a)katipo.co.nz and nic(a)wellington.net.nz all resolve to me, in various guises. A quick count in various bind config files leads to me to believe that I am responsible for name servers mastering for about 120 domains. Whenever I setup new DNS services for a user, they get specific instructions to use one of the above email addresses when they fill out the new domain form on www.domainz.net.nz. The vast majority of them do so, and therefore I would be suprised if there are less that 100 occurrences of "nic" in the .nz registry. As a check, I found 15 nic(a)katipo.co.nz's in the Domainz records for the first 20 domains in the Katipo bind config (the rest were simon(a)katipo.co.nz - oops :-). So the 10 listed for "nic" above, is, bluntly, utterly wrong. I'm not a big registrant, by any means, and I'm also not particularly anal about enforcing that my users type the right info into the Tech contact fields - if they want to put their own email addresses in, that's their lookout. However, I believe that the big registrants generally do the domainz rego on behalf of their users, and so it's fair to assume that most of them are more rigorous than I. Therefore, it seems unlikely to me that addresses such as dns(a)netlink.net.nz, soa(a)xtra.co.nz, and operations(a)2day.net.nz have numbers as low as listed above. Perhaps the relevant people could have fun with wget and grep and confirm this.
In reality, there is little clustering around a few "generic" (soa, admin, etc) names either -- "generics" comprising just over 18% of all names chosen.
That is absolutely *not* what the above data says. The above data says (making the rash generalisation that the top 25 addresses are all generics, and the only generics in the 3200 addresses) that generics account for only 2.5% of the names chosen (this may be an invalid assumption, but you'd expect generics to be towards the top of the list). While generics may comprise only 18% of addressees, I'd love to know what proportion of total domains are covered by generic addresses - I'd hypothesise (and hope) that it would be much, much higher. Obviously, this rant doesn't really add anything to the discussion about email addresses, but I for one would be worried if Domainz were using such patently wrong data as part of their decision making process. Cheers Si --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog