The availability of a string of new top-level domain names have brought with a few headaches. Spammers have been exploiting the registration systems for .NINJA, .CLICK and a number of other new domain extensions. It would appear that the penalty (financially or otherwise) for registering one of these domains and then using it for a spam flood hours later is just not severe enough.
For the past two months or so you may have seen a bit (or a lot) of spam with .NINJA links showing up in your inbox. Call it NINJA spam if you wish. One of the challenges for us was that the URIBL check in SpamAssassin was failing for these new domains.
URIBL is just one of many checks that SpamAssassin performs to identify spam. URIBL is a blacklisting service that records web links used in current spam; when an email arrives with a known spam URL (i.e. the URL is in the URIBL database), then SpamAssassin knows it is spam.
We fixed the problem two weeks ago when we installed installed a new patch for URIBL. Since then, NINJA spam has been virtually non-existent.
We appreciate the work that the good people at SpamAssassin and URIBL do. You are certainly improving people’s lives!