I couldn't understand why so much spam got through the filters.

Yesterday and today I checked 667 addresses that have tried to send me spam in the past days. 661 of the 667 are listed by the Spamhaus Zen list right now, but Google's public DNS resolvers report that only 33-74 are listed, so Spamhaus is effectively neutered.

Google offers two IPv4 and two IPv6 addresses. All four report similar numbers, and the results have been largely stable over the past 24 hours.

A smaller RBL operator does not suffer, so I expect it's some sort of rate limiting by Google. DoS mitigation gone wrong.

Ever since I moved to Munich, I've been struck by the large number of TLAs in Germany, and also by the strange subdomains.

.de has no official subdomains, so people have invented both geographical subdomains and topical subdomains. Good examples are -muenchen.de for anyone located in Munich (bit-muenchen.de, bja-muenchen.de, bjv-muenchen.de, bk-muenchen.de and so on) and -derfilm.de for movies (austinpowers-derfilm.de, etc).

Recently I came across a complete list of .de domains, so I started counting. Which TLA is the most popular? Which German "city subdomain" has the most domains?

Popular TLAs

All the TLAs are registed. When the natural TLA is taken, people have different strategies:

Add hyphens. There are 8111 domains like t-l-a.de.

Add -web or -online to make sure that people understand that not only does the company have a domain, it's even online! (more…)