[news.sysadmin] Usenet Top-Level Domain Census

mcb@ncis.tis.llnl.gov (Michael C. Berch) (04/28/89)

We were sitting around jawing about conversion to the Domain Name
System and how many sites are still using ".UUCP" or other name schemes, 
and how many sites don't put out legal Message-IDs at all.
So I decided to count, using the Message-IDs in the history file. 
I don't remember how long we are keeping things in the history file
after expiration, but there were about 64K articles in the
file, which looked like a good round number for a sample.

The "(No domain)" count were Message-IDs without a dot in them, and
were counted automatically, so I don't know offhand who isn't doing an
addr-spec on the right-hand side of the Message-ID.  The "(Badly
formed)" count was done by hand and represents 202 articles from about 70 
different sites.  Of those 202 articles, about half were literally 
badly-formed garbage and half were nonexistent top-level domains.

I was loose about the legitimacy of top-level domains; in addition to
all the legal (i.e., registered and known to the root servers) domains, 
I also included a few well-known names like "uninett", "junet", "bitnet", 
and "cdn" in the main list instead of putting them in the "nonexistent" 
domain list.  People who used company names, etc., as top level
domains, however, were considered losers and put in the "nonexistent" list.

Michael C. Berch  
mcb@ncis.llnl.gov / uunet!ncis.llnl.gov!mcb

-----
Usenet Top-Level Domain Census, 27 April 1989

edu		24851
com		16019
uucp		15891
gov		  923
org		  859
uk		  758
us		  613
mil		  531
net		  526
ca		  511
arpa		  315
se		  215
nl		  195
oz		  176
bitnet		  128
fi		   85
ie		   78
dk		   63
de		   45
fr		   44
au		   39
ch		   21
cdn		   21
nz		   18
junet		   18
il		   15
no		   13
is		   12
uninett		   11
es		    7
pt		    6
pb		    4
ia		    4
hk		    3
it		    1
cs		    1
(No domain spec) 1699
(Badly formed)	  202
---------------------
Total		64937