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| date | posts | total | BI | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25 Feb 2000 | 189 | 436 | 284.65 | full headers |
| 17 Nov 1999 | 14 | 82 | 33.82 | full headers |
| 02 Nov 1999 | 13 | 78 | 31.84 | full headers |
| 20 Oct 1999 | 24 | 48 | 31.32 | full headers |
| posts | total | BI | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total spam since 30 Apr 1997 | 1675 | 21735 | 5706.51 | |
| Peak spam on 5 May 1997 | 764 | 10293 | 2729.18 | |
| Peak daily spam on 5 May 1997 | 254 | 3431 | 909.73 | (3-day average) |
| Average daily spam | 1.3 | 16.4 | 4.36 |
full history also available
Netcom is a major service provider based out of San Jose, California. Because of their size, and the facilities they provide, there has always been a large amount of spam coming from them. I believe it was Netcom who pioneered the "abuse@" address for reporting abuse.
Netcom's "Zero Tolerance" policy may be found at http://www.netcom.com/netcom/zero_tolerance.html
Although Netcom has an anti-spam policy for its dial-up users, it has a pro-spam policy for its bandwidth customers.
Netcom also permits spammers to maintain web pages at Netcom as long as they do their spamming from throw-away acounts on other providers.
Netcom is also known to send their own spam. See netnews article "Netcom appears to have become a spammer"
In May, 1998, Netcom became the new host for Harris Marketing.
Netcom, like many major service providers, exerts the absolute minimum effort required to stay off the Realtime Black List and avoid the Usenet Death Penalty. Netcom allows spam problems to get worse and worse until they are added to the RBL or are threatened with UDP. They then institute whatever measures are required to avoid the RBL or UDP. Sometimes this consists of simply promising to do something about the problem.
Statistics on spam include both spam which originated at Netcom news servers and from Netcom users hijacking news servers on other systems.
In addition, Netcom has suffered "extreme attrition" in 1997:
The bottom line is that there has been extreme attrition in the Policy Management group over the last 6 months, and it is severely understaffed and lacking expertise. I have advocated taking steps to staff up and recruit, and also to make changes to the various info files that NETCOM uses to respond to problem reports. However, change is going to be slow: there will probably not be noticeable improvement for at least a couple months. This is not what anyone wants to hear, but I am not going to sugar coat reality. It should go without saying that I am doing all I can (as much as my regular duties allow) to push the process of "abuse reform" along. This includes changing NETCOM's position on "haven spam".-- Kael Loftus, Supervisor, NETCOM Network Operations Center
(usenet message "Improving NETCOM")
Netcom Canada and Netcom U.K. are related to Netcom
U.S.A., but have independent server administration, abuse management
and operational policies. Netcom Canada has a strong anti-abuse
policy. Netcom.ca is now tracked seperately from Netcom U.S.A.
To report spam, contact abuse@netcom.com
A complete history may also be available.
Return to top |
Return to spam summaries |
complete history
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.
Site History:
Netcom Pro-spam Policy:
Excerpt from Netcom form letter regarding web page complaints:
Date sent: Fri, 6 Feb 1998 11:50:47 -0800
To: rstarr@eskimo.com
From: NETCOM Policy Management
General notes:
This page maintained by
Ed Falk