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Thursday Apr 20, 2006
AOL censorship
I was going to have a go at McDonalds, but since Sam beat me to that I'll throw out another dig at our second favourite company round here.
The Guardian is reporting that AOL has been blocking emails to its members that contained links to a website that was critical of their service. The site in question, DearAOL.com is a website dedicated to stopping the suggested AOL policy of charging companies to send emails to its members without running anti-spam filters. Essentially it's a pay-to-send policy that's already come in for some criticism on this blog and others, not to mention an open door to spammers and conmen if people can pay to ignore anti-spam filters.
It seems that if an email was sent containing the DearAOL.com link then the email wouldn't make it through, if it didn't contain the link it would go through fine. Now the problem, it seems, is that the very anti-spam filters that AOL is willing to ignore for backhanders had identified DearAOL as spam and was blocking the messages. The problem was fixed within 24 hours but it raises a number of serious questions.
How could an organisation the size of AOL make such an obvious mistake? Given that the organisation was blacklisting a website critical of its own policies you'd think someone would have been checking this didn't happen.
The other question for me is the nature of the ban. AOL has blacklisted a company because their link was appearing in a large number of emails, not because it was spam - as any investigation of the messages would reveal this.
It's a double whammy for people sending emails, even it seems those involved in campaigning - if you get popular and you get mentioned in a lot of messages then AOL's system appears to automatically add you to a blacklist, with no manual checking. Then, in the future, the only solution to this would be to sling some grubby fivers in their direction to be allowed to send your messages.
So AOL's vision would seem to be - 'only the rich will be heard'.
Posted by Jim Valentine ( 3:00 PM ) Link to this post Comments[2]
On your posting... I run a site, http://www.myroyalmail.com . When I was setting it up, and testing the email service, I sent mails to a variety of my existing addresses. I don't have an AOL address because having previously trialed them as an ISP, I decided that they equated to a 'nanny state' or walled garden.
I did , however, have a Google Gmail address. When I sent an email from MyRoyalMail to Gmail with an advertising tagline on the end of it, the mail ended up in the Gmail spambox. When I changed the MyRoyalMail master settings to send email without a tagline, the mail went Ok to my Gmail Inbox. I haven't yet found my way through the 'corporate wall' that is the Google website, and haven't pursued this in other ways because I do other things to earn, and paying the rent takes priority. However, in general , I use specialist email services, like Fastmail, for my personal mail. And try to steer clear of the big names. The sheer volume of real spam that arrives in that Gmail account is amazing.
Andrew Preston
Posted by Andrew Preston on April 20, 2006 at 11:20 PM GMT+00:00 #
Posted by Jim Valentine on April 21, 2006 at 11:37 AM GMT+00:00 #