Re: AOL Blocking of this list

From: Steve Werby <steve-lists_at_befriend.com>
Date: Thu 21 Aug 2003 07:14:17 -0500

"Trevor Johnson" <bpfsa_at_yahoo.com> wrote:
> AOL have recently claimed that "spam" accounts for 80%
> of incoming email, thus their tough blocking measures.

I haven't seen that figure, but I don't doubt that spam is a higher
percentage of incoming email at AOL than other ISPs. And that's reason to
make intelligent decisions to detect and manage spam, but AOL makes some
poor decisions which result in a high percentage of false positives. As an
end user I'd love to have as much spam blocked or tagged as possible, but
not at the expense of failing to receive a significant percentage of
legitimate email. And IMO that's where AOL is failing.

> No-one is more ardently opposed to spam than me.
> However, AOL's claim is a bit hard to swallow. Is
> there a logical reason why AOL is more spam-prone than
> other major ISPs? The other majors put the spam level
> at only half the AOL rate - 40% of incoming mail.

I think there are several logical reasons. If you'd like me to elaborate
let me know.

> That suggests a terrible lot of *legitimate* email
> being blocked by AOL, to the disadvantage of their
> customers. What is AOL's? motive for blocking so much
> legitimate email? They surely couldn't be cost cutting
> by saving on bandwidth, could they?

Stupidity and ignorance at AOL and ignorance and lack of pressure from their
customers concerning blocked legitimate email. I'll give them the benefit
of the doubt and assume their motives are good, but their processes and
execution are poor. In my earlier email I mentioned a client's real life
experience that demonstrates how easy it is for an entire mail server to be
blocked by AOL simply because AOL allows customers to proclaim email spam
and report it, apparently without AOL actually checking if it's unsolicited
bulk email and stupidly penalizing any mail servers that touched the email.
A colleague of mine had his entire satellite ISP mail server blocked by AOL
(tens of thousands of users). I shudder at the thought, but I believe that
any one AOL customer could innocently or maliciously cause a mail server to
be blocked simply by reporting enough email from that mail server as spam,
whether or not it actually was spam.

--
Steve Werby
President, Befriend Internet Services LLC
http://www.befriend.com/






Received on Thu Aug 21 2003 - 07:14:17 CDT