Overview of spam from Alt.net

15 Feb 2006

Note: Automated spam monitoring stopped several years ago. These web pages are maintained for historical reasons. Some may be updated from time to time as news about the individual sites becomes available.

No spam today

Overview of last 14 reports

date	posts	total	BI
11 Sep 2000	180	737	344.02	full headers
23 Jul 2000	83	258	141.06	full headers
07 Jul 2000	47	182	82.03	full headers
09 Jun 2000	26	102	45.86	full headers
19 May 2000	21	73	35.31
21 Apr 2000	53	174	86.82
14 Mar 2000	416	1720	800.05
25 Feb 2000	286	1017	516.43
24 Jan 2000	25	128	53.91
12 Jan 2000	12	76	30.15
03 Jan 2000	41	195	87.60
21 Dec 1999	42	270	106.30
17 Dec 1999	12	77	30.35
16 Dec 1999	22	148	56.93

Overview of history

	posts	total	BI
Total spam since 1 Nov 1999	1391	5969	2733.35
Peak spam on 14 Mar 2000	416	1720	800.05
Peak daily spam on 14 Mar 2000	23	95	44.45	(18-day average)
Average daily spam	4.4	18.7	8.61

full history also available

General information about Alt.net

Added 2 Sept 1997

Alt.net has a usage policy that explicitly permits forged moderator approval. See netnews article help with moderator forgeries

Ownership & Contact Info
Site history

Ownership & Contact Info

Whois identifies alt.net as

Altopia Corporation ALT2-DOM
   P.O. Box 2150
   North Bend, WA 98045-2150

   Domain Name: ALT.NET

   Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
      Caputo, Chris ccaputo@ALT.NET
      206-888-1965 (FAX) 206-888-4865
   Billing Contact:
      Caputo, Chris ccaputo@ALT.NET
      206-888-1965 (FAX) 206-888-4865

   Record last updated on 28-Apr-97.
   Record created on 15-Mar-95.
   Database last updated on 8-Sep-97 04:37:06 EDT.

   Domain servers in listed order:

   NS1.ALT.NET                  207.14.113.2
   NS2.ALT.NET                  207.14.113.9
   NS3.ALT.NET                  207.14.113.10

Site history

2 Sept 1997: Added to spam tracking list.

8 Sept 1997: Alt.net has reportedly blocked posts from Aisi. No spam has been seen since early morning on the 7th.
9 Sept 1997: Alt.net admins have informed me that the two users who were spamming have been given a warning.

To report spam, contact abuse@alt.net

A complete history may also be available.

General notes:

Only a small subset of usenet (261 groups) was sampled. Only articles that hadn't been cancelled yet were counted. Actual spam may have been much greater.
Heuristics that detect single-posted articles are, by their very nature, somewhat shaky. Innocent articles may be tagged as spam because they share certain characteristics or keywords with actual spam. In particular, a posted spam complaint that includes the spam in its entirety will very often be identified as spam.
Some posts may be forgeries intended to look like they came from Alt.net.
The first entry in the history file is not used to compute peak or average spam counts, as this entry covers an unknown number of days. This may cause an apparent disreprency between spam totals and spam averages.

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The opinions expressed on this page are solely those of Ed Falk and do not necessarily represent those of any other organization, (although I hope they do). I wish to thank Rahul.net for hosting this web page.