Overview of spam from Worldnet

10 Nov 2005

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 12 reports

date	posts	total	BI
11 Sep 2000	115	245	157.62	full headers
09 Jun 2000	43	155	78.11	full headers
19 May 2000	32	60	42.69	full headers
21 Apr 2000	26	52	34.50	full headers
14 Mar 2000	122	345	200.79
03 Jan 2000	123	582	264.82
17 Dec 1999	49	245	109.57
14 Dec 1999	64	290	133.95
09 Dec 1999	22	57	33.50
12 Nov 1999	23	55	34.50
01 Nov 1999	33	112	60.55
20 Oct 1999	39	121	66.14

Overview of history

	posts	total	BI
Total spam since 20 Oct 1999	691	2319	1216.74
Peak spam on 3 Jan 2000	123	582	264.82
Peak daily spam on 17 Dec 1999	16	81	36.52	(3-day average)
Average daily spam	2.0	6.7	3.53

full history also available

General information about Worldnet

Worldnet is AT&T WorldNet Service. Worldnet has a history of being slow to respond to complaints, and of lacking the technical skill to deal with problems. Lately, Worldnet has begun to take a serious look at doing something about the spam problem. I have even received a response from a live human.

Worldnet seems to have finally gotten a handle on their email spam problems, but netnews spam continues unabated.

Worldnet, like many major service providers, exerts the absolute minimum effort required to stay off the Realtime Black List and avoid the Usenet Death Penalty. Worldnet 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.

A copy of the Worldnet Terms Of Service may be found at http://www.att.net/care/terms/

Ownership & Contact Info
Site history
Cancel statistics

Ownership & Contact Info

Whois identifies worldnet.att.net as

AT&T EasyLink Services ATT2-DOM
   400 Interpace Pkwy
   Room B3C25
   Parsippany, NJ 07054-1113
   US

   Domain Name: ATT.NET

   Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
      Global Network Management Center hostmaster@ATTMAIL.COM
      314-519-5708


   Record last updated on 05-Mar-97.
   Record created on 13-Dec-93.
   Database last updated on 8-Sep-97 04:37:06 EDT.

   Domain servers in listed order:

   ORCU.OR.BR.NP.ELS-GMS.ATT.NET199.191.129.139
   WYCU.WY.BR.NP.ELS-GMS.ATT.NET199.191.128.43
   OHCU.OH.MT.NP.ELS-GMS.ATT.NET199.191.144.75
   MACU.MA.MT.NP.ELS-GMS.ATT.NET199.191.145.136

Site history

28 July 1997: Woodside has moved to Worldnet
2 Oct 1997: I have heard from a live human at Worldnet.
30 April 1997: Worldnet has morphed their headers, causing spam to go undetected. This has been corrected.
4 June 2000: It has been revealed that AT&T enters into contracts with known spammers exempting them from their AUP. See netnews article AT&T writes pink contracts, confirmed!

Cancel Statistics

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

8 Sept 1997: 11985

To report spam, contact one or more of

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 Worldnet.
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.