What kind of address is '3483043927' ?

[Stephen Mawdsley]

At 08:59 PM 8/11/2000, you wrote:
>I got today a spam message that includes the link http://3483043927/
>
>What kind of host spec is '3483043927' ? It is not in the top
>domains (e.g. .com) and is not an IP address in dot
>notation (e.g. 1.2.3.4). I have never seen anything like that
>before.

Greetings Tal,

What you encountered is a dword equivalent of a dotted-decimal IP 
address.  This practise isn't exactly RFC-friendly, but it accomplishes the 
spammers' goal which is to obscure the destination URL.  There is a great 
article detailing how this is accomplished:
http://www.nwi.net/~pchelp/obscure.htm

Regards,
Stephen