Fascinating thread I just stumbled on. Yes, in early parts of the phone
system, the letters were geographic and referenced the street for where
the central office was located switching those calls. For example, in
Arlington VA, my grandfathers number was 533-9389 which was referred to
as JE3-9389 and the CO was on Jefferson St. I'm pretty sure this fell
apart rapidly as the system grew.
However, you can see this referenced in things like
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jZeTtGeQYg and was a real hotel. It was
Hotel Penn in NYC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_Pennsylvania).
That hotel was recently closed but until then, you could add the NYC
area code (212 I believe) and call that number still. Will be
interesting to see where the number goes now.
Anyway, we are working on an RBL for these evil numbers tracking. It's
going to require a plugin we think but we've been doing a fake RBL in
KAM.cf for these evil numbers. If you are calling and confirming the
numbers are evil and want to help RBL them, ping me off list.
Regards,
KAM
On 6/25/2021 7:21 PM, Grant Taylor wrote:
My understanding is the letters were (the first?) part of the phone
switch / exchange name. The following Wikipedia article supports this
and has more details.
--
Kevin A. McGrail
kmcgr...@apache.org
Member, Apache Software Foundation
Chair Emeritus Apache SpamAssassin Project
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kmcgrail - 703.798.0171
