At 11:09 AM 5/26/98 -0400, Judith Hopkins wrote:
>This question is purely a matter of personal interest, not really
>listowner related.
>
>Does anyone know how the two letter geographical domains at the end of
>all non-US and some US e-mail addresses are assigned?   The reason I ask
>is that I recently did a REVIEW BY COUNTRY for a list to which I
>subscribe.  Among the country codes listed was  NU which expanded to Niue.
>That turns out to be an island in the South Pacific, population 4,200,
>about 1,500 miles NE of New Zealand.

These country codes are an ISO-standard : ISO 3166 to be exact. The
complete list is at
http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/country-codes : IANA is the
organization which keeps this and other registries.

>
>However, when I checked the specific address of the one subscriber in that
>domain, it was  [log in to unmask]     Sure enough, when I wrote to the
>individual, she lives in Vermont and her ISP is headquartered in Stowe,
>Vermont.   So how on earth did it get the address   STOWE.NU  ?

Soms DNS authorities in 3th world countries seem to accept almost any
domain name for cash. Several of those country codes can be useful to some
people.

For example : come.to and move.to use the 'to' country, which is the island
of Tonga. I've also seen TM (Turkmenistan), which is pretty funny when
combined with your company-name. I don't see the advantage of STOWE.NU, but
you can pronounce 'NU' as 'NEW' (at least native English speakers do that :)

>
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>Judith Hopkins, Listowner of Autocat
>     [log in to unmask]
>     My home page: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~ulcjh
>     AUTOCAT home page:
>     http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/units/cts/autocat/
>
>
---
Jo Hermans, System Administrator DINF, VUB University, Brussels
[log in to unmask]                http://dinf.vub.ac.be/~jo/
Tel : +32-2-629.38.19               Fax : +32-2-629.35.25

Co-listmom (sic) of Blues-L         news:bit.listserv.blues-l
Maintains the Benelux Blues Scene   http://blues.vub.ac.be/