A number of people (myself included) suggested this in the 2003 WHOIS
policy review (http://www.auda.org.au/reviews/whois-2003/).

The response was (from Response to Public Comments, 20/08/03)

"There is no evidence to suggest that registrant email addresses are
being harvested from the WHOIS database for spamming purposes, and in
any case auDA believes that the best way to manage this risk is by
imposing WHOIS query limits and bulk access restrictions. 

auDA notes comments about various technical solutions, such as email
masking, one-time-use email addresses or contact via web forms. For the
reasons given above, we do not consider it appropriate to introduce such
measures at this time. However, we will monitor the development and
implementation of different technologies by industry providers in other
domain spaces for possible application in .au."

-----Original Message-----
From: Jason Allen [mailto:jallen§pobox.com] 
Sent: Thursday, 21 July 2005 2:47 PM
To: dns§dotau.org
Subject: [DNS] Re: Whois & Spam


On Thu, 21 Jul 2005, Adrian Kinderis wrote:

> Perhaps you could come up with ideas, other than "masking the email
> address", that would solve this "problem"...

Remove/mask the registrant and tech email addresses. Make the Registrant

ROID and Tech ID a hyperlinked URL that goes to an AusRegistry page that

is a standard "send an email" form. The processing of the page will take

the Registrant ROID or Tech ID and perform a lookup of the matching
email 
address, sending the email to that user. The input form will also have a

dynamic obscured alpha-numeric (that were all used to now-a-days) that
the 
users is required to type in to ensure they aren't an automated 
program/script.

Fairly easy solutions if you ask me...

---
Cheers,
Jason

Ideas don't stay in some minds very long because they don't like
solitary confinement.

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