Holy Cow!

[Hooper]

It's a good business idea but it's TERRIBLE for the internet.

Take for example... email bounces. Normally you send an email and if you make a typo in the address your smtp host will alert you pretty quickly with a mailer daemon error telling you that the host was not valid. Now the host *IS* valid no thanks to verisign... so now the email gets delivered to verisigns servers and you better hope their email servers arent swampped with typos cause otherwise you might not find out for days (if ever) that your email wasnt delivered as expected. This is just one example.

Take for example... billing processors. Many of them use bounced emails as an indicator that the recipient didnt get their e-receipt.. normally processors cancel the trial of somebody who didnt get the e-receipt.. now... that entire process is worthless... meaning that you'll likely have a higher chargeback ratio than before. thanks to versign.

Newsletters suddenly are more problematic. Many of the optin systems rely upon looking up the valid mx host for a domain name/email that you type in when subscribing.... now they all get returned as valid. Meaning that the amount of bogus email being sent is going to sky rocket.

How about tgp's? Many of them do automatic lookups on your domain to make sure it's valid. Now they cant....

those are just the examples i came up with off the top of my head. it's fucked, just another sign of verisign abusing their powers. I cant wait for them to be forced to stop this.