Overview of spam from Geocities.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	241	1512	588.04	full headers
23 Jul 2000	116	642	265.45	full headers
07 Jul 2000	78	434	175.93	full headers
23 Jun 2000	157	746	320.55	full headers
19 May 2000	71	267	121.33
05 May 2000	38	184	76.32
28 Apr 2000	44	294	105.48
21 Apr 2000	47	286	106.31
07 Apr 2000	57	457	157.09
14 Mar 2000	240	976	462.14
25 Feb 2000	236	1162	503.00
24 Jan 2000	13	92	32.75
19 Jan 2000	17	129	45.18
14 Jan 2000	14	83	32.38

Overview of history

	posts	total	BI
Total spam since 18 Oct 1999	1864	9700	3894.44
Peak spam on 11 Sep 2000	241	1512	588.04
Peak daily spam on 20 Oct 1999	88	120	96.31	(2-day average)
Average daily spam	5.6	28.9	11.63

full history also available

General information about Geocities.com

Added 25 June 1998. This report covers spam advertising web sites hosted by Geocities. Often, there is nothing in the header that points to Geocities. Investigators will need to check message bodies to confirm the spam.

15 Oct 1999 -- "Iani" spammer has moved to Geocities. See sample spam below.

24 Sept 1998 -- Tom Gartman is still on Geocities.

10 Aug 1998 -- Tom Gartman is now advertising a web page hosted by Geocities. See the first sample spam, below.

Sample spams are shown here:

Path: denver-news-feed1.bbnplanet.com!su-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com! cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.gtei.net!news.maxwell.syr.edu! newsfeeds.belnet.be!news.belnet.be!colt.net!Pollux.Teleglobe.net! server-b.cs.interbusiness.it!news.tin.it!not-for-mail From: madQ <madq968@djeksta.comNOSPAM> Newsgroups: sci.materials.ceramics Subject: Download Ia.n.i.!!! It's free! Date: 15 Oct 1999 19:18:13 GMT Organization: madQ Lines: 4 Message-ID: <7u7ull$sk$844@nslave1.tin.it> NNTP-Posting-Host: 212.216.13.197 X-Newsreader: madQ Download Ia.n.i. RemoteControlSystem 1.2 beta. It's free!!! New site: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Chip/5989/

To report spam, contact abuse@Geocities.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 Geocities.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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