Slashdot Mirror
AOL Blocks Telstra Bigpond Mail
frodmann writes "Australian IT reports here that AOL has been blocking email from Telstra bigpond mail accounts. This is possibly attributed to AOL's new white list policy as reported earlier on Slashdot.
Although this article is a few days old I can verify that this is still happening.
(For those outside of Australia, Telstra is one of our largest ISPs.)"
Typically the service offered from Tesltra is Australia is terrible, but due to lack of competition in Australia they have been able to get away with shoddy service and gerneral non-compliance for years.
" For those outside of Australia, Telstra is one of our largest ISPs. "
Telstra is Australia's largest ISP.
I'm not particularly surprised that this happened, seeing as how Telstra was almost blocked from Usenet not long ago. Fortunately for Telstra users, it seems to be trying to do something about it.
OLPC Australia
Maybe it costs you more because of the
asymmetric nature of internet interconnection. Telstra probably has much higher expenses than ISPs in the US and Europe.
I'm not surprised, to tell the truth. Two seconds of looking on Whirlpool (the Australian Broadband Users' Community) will highlight exactly how bodgy Bigpond can be. I'm sure their own spam procedures have been less than perfect (or even good) for a long time, so I'm not surprised that other ISP's have had to block them out.
As much as I hate AOL, I'm not sure that this situation is ALL their fault -- if Telstra took the spam problem more seriously themselves, then AOL may not have felt that they need to take this measure.
Still, that all said, I do find it amusing that one bodgy, overpriced major ISP has blocked another bodgy, overpriced major ISP....
From http://www.falundafa.org/eng/faq.htm
Q: What is Falun Dafa, or Falun Gong?
A: Falun Dafa, also known as Falun Gong, is an ancient practice for mind and body, originating in pre-historic China. The practice involves some slow, gentle movements and a meditation...
It's being cracked down on by China because of its spiritual nature.
It has absolutely nothing to do with spamming.
Spamkillers like this one are also based on whitelisting e-mail addresses (although with built-in mechanisms to enable automatic whitelisting of non-spammers):
http://a-s-k.sourceforge.net/
Since this method works much better than spamassassin, RBL and similar methods, we better get used to whitelisting. Telstra simply has to get onto the whitelist fast.
A couple guys in australia are responsible for a huge amount of porno spam. Including the animal stuff...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Wrong. It is not a bit harsh - it is a massive understatemenmt to say that Telstra is a government approved monopoly. It is a government OWNED monolopoly. Then see who has their claws in deepest for the 49% that has been sold off - media monolpolies that our government drops their strides for every time they are asked.
I'm also in favour of government retaining the infrastructure (ie the cables & exchanges or power grid) and charging whoever wants to pay for a licence access. This is not what has happened. The guts are sold lock,stock and barrel. In the case of Telstra this has not been allowed to happen for a few reasons, the main one being the decimation that would occur in the false free market that exists in Aussie telcos right now.
I think the funny part is this, I have been led to believe that when AOL setup here in Australia, Telstra provided the dial in for AOL.
I think the dial-in lines are now being hosted by MCI Worldcom.
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
AOL block 780 Million messages a day. This is 100 Million messages more than are actually delivered.
.mac mail used to be _really_ good at filtering mail, but some users complained and they loosed up Brightmail it seems - and now it's noticeably less effective.
AOL spam filtering is a LOT more complex than 'block mail from X server', and it's good at it's job - but like any system it's not infallible.
As many providers have found out, if you make it *really* effective, it starts getting false positives and that irritates some customers far more. As an example, Apple's
Don't forget this is in Australian dollars - this morning 1 Aussie dollar was worth just over 61 US cents.
As for supporting Australian businesses, I'd love to support a Telstra rival - Telstra owns the exchanges that all the other ISP's have to get access to, and charges high rates for access so no other ISP can undercut them with their broadband.
But maybe the competition don't spend as much on marketing. I find that bigpond is taken up by people who don't do any research of their own about the best ISP for them.
On the other hand Telstra is still choking the broadband adsl market all by itself. It is getting more difficult for it to get away with that. Everyone has to go thru Telstra one way or another for ADSL, but nearly every other ISP still manages to offer a better deal and better service even though they have to purchase thru Telstra. Except the ISPs with worse management than Telstra.
When my friends ask me who to sign up with I won't let them sign up with Telstra. Or Optus.
Look for the geeks running ISPs, who have just enough sense to hire a business manager to make sure they cover their costs. These guys aren't solely profit motivated, they have a great understanding of the technology and always keep up. Stay clear of the corporate monsters, or entrepreneur types, who don't care about anything except separating customers from their money. Service? what is that?.
My current favourite is internode.com.au. I also like adam.com.au although they're adelaide based. I like Goldweb in Canberra. iinet.com.au and ihug.com.au seem to be ok but I'd need to check a bit more. ihug seems a little secretive but iinet have the right kind of history. And yes I've been burned by isp mergers like dynamite.com.au -> eisa -> austar, thats why you have to steer clear of the entrepreneurs.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.