Overview of spam from Home.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	568	3567	1384.31	full headers
23 Jul 2000	207	1226	490.25	full headers
07 Jul 2000	264	1843	683.29	full headers
23 Jun 2000	189	1084	437.47	full headers
09 Jun 2000	412	2904	1069.96
19 May 2000	176	1228	455.67
05 May 2000	69	488	181.92
28 Apr 2000	74	484	185.76
21 Apr 2000	159	1009	389.54
07 Apr 2000	177	1199	449.98
14 Mar 2000	209	1383	521.17
25 Feb 2000	317	2009	777.75
26 Jan 2000	24	166	62.53
24 Jan 2000	23	151	57.30

Overview of history

	posts	total	BI
Total spam since 18 Oct 1999	10954	77655	28589.72
Peak spam on 3 Jan 2000	2024	15423	5531.08
Peak daily spam on 6 Dec 1999	434	3440	1219.89	(3-day average)
Average daily spam	33.2	235.6	86.75

full history also available

General information about Home.com

@Home is an internet service which provides high bandwidth internet access over cable TV cables.

@Home has a good abuse policy but does not enforce it. This allows spammers based at @Home to run rampant.

In addition, computers connected to the internet via @Home are often mis-configured to act as relays. These are quickly discovered by spammers and used to relay spam.

For these reasons, @Home is (as of Jan 2000) the largest source of spam on the internet.

A copy of @Home's acceptable use policy may be found at @Home Service Acceptable Use Policy

Site history
Netnews Feeds

Currently (Sept 1999) hosting Tom Saylor. Posts consist of random subject lines and uuencoded images. Images are rotated from a small pool of porn images. Images contain a reference to a web site owned by Saylor.

Originally added 30 April 1998 due to rogue cancels by Robert Bass. Bass claims that Home.net gave him permission to cancel posts of users on other ISP's due to content. For more information, see thread "fully authorised Cancels of slanderous posts in comp.home.automation" in Deja News.

My ISP authorised me to cancel the posts due to his repeated refusal to comply with the standards of Usenet behavior. He will find his posts completely blocked shortly.
Robert L Bass, netnews article:
"fully authorised Cancels of slanderous posts in comp.home.automation"

Home.com's AUP can be found at @Home Acceptable Use Policy

Home.net seems to have a mediocre abuse policy. Abuse responses are answered by an auto-responder which provides a list of recent abuse cases and how they were resolved. Abuse reports seem to progress through stages "User warned", "User given final warning", "User suspended" and "User terminated". Spammers are allowed multiple spams before being terminated.

Site history

14 Jan 2000: CNN is covering the UDP. See article @Home threatened with discussion-group blackballing.
14 Jan 2000: C|Net is covering the UDP. See article Usenet may block Excite@Home users.
14 Jan 2000: Wired: Dead ISP Walking
14 Jan 2000: ZDNet: @Home-Usenet scuffle could be settled.
13 Jan 2000: @Home has announced that they will now deal with the spam problem. See netnews article Re: [usenet] Response to Usenet Death Penalty Notice: @Home Network
12 Jan 2000: UDP announced against @Home. See netnews article [usenet] Usenet Death Penalty Notice: @Home Network UDP scheduled to take effect 18 Jan 2000.
10 Jan 2000: Formal UDP proposal has been made and is under discussion. See netnews article [RFD] @Home UDP Proposal: A Request for Remedial Action.
4 Jan 2000: UDP discussions are underway in the news.admin.net-abuse.usenet newsgroup.
4 Jan 2000: A rogue canceller is now cancelling from @Home. This canceller is believed to be Tom Gartman.
3 Jan 2000: Home has morphed their headers, causing posts to be lost. This has been corrected.
12 Nov 1999: Tom Saylor spamming again.
1 Oct 1999: Hollywood Whores porn spammer has signed up.
27 Sept 1999: Some sort of commercial spammer called "Tradewinds" has signed on.
21 Sept 1999: Tom Saylor has signed up.

NetNews Feeds

@Home receives netnews feeds from the following sites that I know of:

Abs.net

Concentric.net
Sgi.com
Verio
Via.net

To report spam, contact abuse@home.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 Home.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.