Overview of spam from Pacbell.net

29 Jan 2002

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 5 reports

date	posts	total	BI
07 Jul 2000	62	268	126.94	full headers
23 Jun 2000	79	334	157.87	full headers
09 Jun 2000	414	718	508.20	full headers
19 May 2000	44	84	56.36	full headers
21 Apr 2000	49	193	95.74	full headers

Overview of history

	posts	total	BI
Total spam since 30 Apr 1997	671	1896	1027.39
Peak spam on 9 Jun 2000	414	718	508.20
Peak daily spam on 9 Jun 2000	19	34	24.20	(21-day average)
Average daily spam	0.6	1.5	0.84

full history also available

General information about Pacbell.net

Pacbell is a rogue site as far as usenet news is concerned. Many, if not most, other sites on the internet have permanently blocked Pacbell (passive udp).

Full UDP was announced against PacBell on 6 Sept 2001, scheduled to go into effect on 13 Sept. Update: postponed two days in wake of attacks in New York city. Update: 14 Sept: spam levels are way down; PacBell may be complying. See also Pacbell.net UDP Averted! web page.

If your ISP is a usenet news peer with Pacific Bell, you may want to consider terminating that relationship.

For more information see website Pinkbell.net

Pac Bell has allgedly taken a pro-spam stance, as indicated by this letter reposted to the net (article Pacbell.net says "spam is OK, we won't stop it")

You wrote:
________________
Why am I continuing to receive spams routed through PacBell.net
from panda03@prodigy.net?  Stop relaying this spam!

[ text of spam deleted ]

__________________
My [Starr McFarland's] response:

Unfortunately, there is no law yet which regulates email. We cant filter
it out because we 
dont know  whether you would want to receive it.

1.  Try not to give out your email address while you are online. 
    Anytime you fill out a form and type in your email address, you
    increase the chances of your email address ending up on a mailing
    list.

2.  Email the postmaster from where the email came. For instance, if the mail 
    came from userid@someisp.net, forward it and a complaint to 
    postmaster@someisp.net. (In this case, it looks like it would be 
    postmaster@prodigy.net)

3.  You could get an email program with a good filtering system. 
    Theres a lot of mail client programs out there that you can check out.

4.  Most of us simply trash  junk email as soon as we get it.  Just
    like you do with more traditional snail mail.

Here is an interesting URL you can check out that was used in an
article on combating SPAM on the Internet that you may find useful:

http://www.compulink.co.uk/~net-services/spam/

I hope this helps you,

Sincerely,
Starr McFarland
Technical Analyst-Pacific Bell Internet
1-800-708-INET
support@pacbell.net

See also this article from Jan, 2002: Pacbell: No spam laws exist, so eat up!

To report spam, contact postmaster@pacbell.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 Pacbell.net.
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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