Overview of spam from Compuserve

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 3 reports

date	posts	total	BI
11 Sep 2000	17	59	30.34	full headers
19 May 2000	24	57	33.25	full headers
14 Dec 1999	37	99	55.34	full headers

Overview of history

	posts	total	BI
Total spam since 14 Dec 1999	78	215	118.93
Peak spam on 19 May 2000	24	57	33.25
Peak daily spam on 11 Sep 2000	0	0	0.26	(115-day average)
Average daily spam	0.2	0.4	0.23

full history also available

General information about Compuserve

Compuserve is one of the oldest and best-known ISP's on the net. Although there are occasional problems with netnews spam from Compuserve, they are few and far between. Email spam is another matter. In addition, in Aug, 1998, large numbers of rogue cancels began coming from Compuserve.

Compuserve also owns Interserve, presumably to service higher-end customers. Both have been the source of spam on occasion.

Compuserve, like many major service providers, exerts the absolute minimum effort required to stay off the Realtime Black List and avoid the Usenet Death Penalty. Compuserve allowed spam problems to get worse and worse until an actual UDP was instituted against them. They then implemented whatever measures are required to reverse the UDP.

Compuserve admins have requested that I track Sprynet seperately. Sprynet is now owned by Mindspring.

Ownership & Contact Info
Site history

Ownership & Contact Info

Whois identifies Compuserve as

CompuServe Incorporated COMPUSERVE-DOM
   5000 Arlington Centre Blvd.
   Columbus, OH 43220
   US

   Domain Name: COMPUSERVE.COM

   Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
      Hostmaster, Compuserve hostmaster@COMPUSERVE.NET
      614/457-8600
   Billing Contact:
      Accounts Payable, Compuserve hostmaster@COMPUSERVE.NET
      614/457-8600

   Record last updated on 27-Aug-96.
   Record created on 06-Oct-88.
   Database last updated on 3-Sep-97 04:53:18 EDT.

   Domain servers in listed order:

   ARL-NAME-SVC-1.COMPUSERVE.COM149.174.211.5
   DUB-NAME-SVC-1.COMPUSERVE.COM149.174.213.5

Whois identifies Interserve as

Spry/CompuServe INTERSERV-DOM
   3535 128th Ave. SE
   Bellevue, WA 98006

   Domain Name: INTERSERV.COM

   Administrative Contact:
      Bruner, James jtb@SPRY.COM
      206 441-8099 (FAX) 206 441-8772
   Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
      Operations, Sprynet noc@INTERSERV.NET
      206 441-8099, Fax- 206 441-8772
   Billing Contact:
      Hedman, Bonnie bonnie@SPRY.COM
      206 957-8221

   Record last updated on 02-Apr-97.
   Record created on 16-Aug-93.
   Database last updated on 3-Sep-97 04:53:18 EDT.

   Domain servers in listed order:

   NS1.INTERSERV.NET            165.121.1.2
   NS2.INTERSERV.NET            165.121.2.2
   NS1.SPRINTLINK.NET           204.117.214.10
   NS2.SPRINTLINK.NET           199.2.252.10

Site history

2 April 1999: Tom Gartman has moved to Compuserve.
4 Aug 1998: A massive rogue cancel attack is taking place from Compuserve.
21 April 1998: Some posts previously ascribed to Compuserve have turned out to be forgeries from PSI
7 April 1998: Donavan Stanley has explained that spam previously attributed to Compuserve actuall came from Sprynet, which leases Compuserve POPs.
30 Jan 1998: Compuserve and Sprynet now tracked seperately.
5 Dec 1997: Netzilla has begun spamming from Interserve.
24 Nov 1997: Another UDP article from InfoWorld.
20 Nov 1997: Another UDP article from PC World.
19 Nov 1997: C|Net reports UDP Lifted
18 Nov 1997: Compuserve was UDP'd. News articles on the UDP can be found at C|Net and InfoWorld. UDP lasted only one day. Compuserve has agreed to adopt and enforce an anti-abuse acceptable use policy.
14 Nov 1997: Discussion has begun on issuing a UDP against Compuserve.
12 Nov 1997: Woodside has moved to Compuserve
28 Oct 1997: Modified filters to catch new header-morph.
4 Sept 1997: Added Interserve to tracking list.

To report spam, contact abuse@compuserve.com

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 Compuserve.
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.