Overview of spam from Aol.com

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	97	108	99.46	full headers
09 Jun 2000	66	66	66.00	full headers
21 Apr 2000	70	70	70.00	full headers
07 Apr 2000	90	90	90.00	full headers
14 Mar 2000	161	161	161.00
25 Feb 2000	303	303	303.00
24 Jan 2000	41	41	41.00
19 Jan 2000	32	32	32.00
12 Jan 2000	29	29	29.00
03 Jan 2000	66	72	67.65
21 Dec 1999	58	58	58.00
14 Dec 1999	72	72	72.00
06 Dec 1999	46	46	46.00
03 Dec 1999	52	52	52.00

Overview of history

	posts	total	BI
Total spam since 18 Oct 1999	1750	1775	1756.11
Peak spam on 25 Feb 2000	303	303	303.00
Peak daily spam on 20 Oct 1999	30	30	30.00	(2-day average)
Average daily spam	5.2	5.3	5.24

full history also available

General information about Aol.com

Added 3 Sept 1997.

Abuse@aol.com is a black hole. Send abuse complaints to lorin@aol.net instead.

For more information, see SamSpade web page AOL Considered Harmful.

AOL has sent out spam which contains javascript. If you have an AOL installer on your hard drive, following the spamvertised link causes Internet Explorer to disconnect you from the Internet and to start the installation of AOL, which replaces your existing Internet connection.

For more information, see netnews thread AOL Spamvertising, especially this article which shows the actual html code.

Reminder: Always disable java and javascript while reading email. Do not place AOL on your "trusted publishers" list. Try not to use Internet Explorer.

Update: 29 Mar 2000. Tosusenet@aol.com is known to bounce

Notes about valid AOL account names, courtesy of Ron Newman:

AOL's current abuse auto-reply contains useful information
about how to recognize at least some forged AOL addresses:

-------------
   Valid AOL address can not:
      -be shorter than 3 or longer than 10 characters
      -begin with numerals
      -contain periods, underscores, dashes or other punctuation 
       characters

Valid AOL mail will have a short, verifiable Received path directly from a 
resolvable host within AOL.COM to your mail host.
------------

I think that translates into this procmail rule:

:0:
* ^(From|Reply-To): (.|..|...........+|[0-9].+|.*[^a-zA-Z0-9]+.*)@aol.(com|net)
$SPAM

Anyone want to improve on this?

Site history

21 April, 2000 AOL is blocking email from Pac Bell because of spam. Read all about it in The San Francisco Chronicle.
13 April 2000: AOL has resumed their postmaster@aol.com email address.
April 2000: AOL has discontinued their abuse@aol.com and postmaster@aol.com email addresses, in direct violation of internet protocol standards.
7 Jan 2000: AOL has sent out spam which contains javascript. If you have an AOL installer on your hard drive, following the spamvertised link causes Internet Explorer to disconnect you from the Internet and to start the installation of AOL, which replaces your existing Internet connection.
For more information, see netnews thread AOL Spamvertising
Reminder: Always disable java while reading email. Try not to use Internet Explorer.
14 Dec 1999: Report now includes "cs.com", aka Compuserve2000, which is not associated with Compuserve.
3 Sept 1997: Added to tracking list.

To report spam, contact lorin@aol.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 Aol.com.
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.