Overview of spam from Superlink

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 history

	posts	total	BI
Total spam since 30 Apr 1997	107	3854	634.30
Peak spam on 1 May 1997	41	1599	256.04
Peak daily spam on 1 May 1997	41	1599	256.04
Average daily spam	18.4	653.8	108.13

full history also available

General information about Superlink

Superlink is a major ISP with a long history of severe spamming. For a while, they were considered rogue and nearly UDP'd.

At one point, Superlink officials informed various netizens that it had no intention of doing anything about spam. Superlink administrative contact is Jerry Wang who has taken pro-spam positions in the past.

Eventually, Superlink agreed to do something about the spam problem, even instituting a Superlink Spam Report web page, which may be used to report spams. In addition, posts from Superlink now contain what appears to be an encoded sender ID in the Sender: header line. These two changes, plus lowered spam counts from Superlink seem to indicate a change in Superlink policies.

Lately however (Sept 1997), spam counts have once again risen to unacceptable levels, with alt.sexual.abuse.recovery being hit especially hard.

Ownership & Contact Info
Site history
Cancel statistics

Ownership & Contact Info

Whois identifies Superlink as

SuperNet, Inc. SUPERLINK-DOM
   P. O. Box 219
   Milltown, NJ 08850

   Domain Name: SUPERLINK.NET

   Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
      Wang, Jerry jerryw@SUPERLINK.NET
      908-828-8988

   Record last updated on 03-Jan-97.
   Record created on 30-Nov-94.
   Database last updated on 3-Sep-97 04:53:18 EDT.

   Domain servers in listed order:

   DNS.SUPERLINK.NET            204.97.220.2
   EARTH.SUPERLINK.NET          204.97.220.6

Site history

Spring, 1997Partial UDP (Usenet Death Penalty) of Superlink is now underway. This may reduce the spam counts from Superlink. See message id <970131170036.2646.11363@ferret.ocunix.on.ca> for more info. See also message <E57vqG.CF9@nonexistent.com>.
15 Aug 1997: Partial UDP lifted.
3 Sept 1997: Spam counts from Superlink have begun to skyrocket again.
13 Oct 1997: "pornomaster.com" has joined Superlink. Spam over 12,000.

Cancel Statistics

Statistics provided by Andrew Gierth. Numbers are for the week preceding the date.

31 Aug 1997: 55503
8 Sept 1997: 246710

To report spam, contact postmaster@superlink.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 Superlink.
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.