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AOL Blocks Telstra Bigpond Mail

Posted by timothy on from the you're-not-on-the-a-list dept.

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.)"

8 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. Telstra BigPond is crap!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Telstra BigPond is crap!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Telstra was the government owned telco in Australia. They have been partly privitised and other telcos have been introduced to the market. Unfortunately Telstra still owns all of the major telecommunications infrastructure in Australia so there is almost no way for consumers or other telcos to avoid them.

      Optus (the second largest telco, now owned by Singtel) started to do a roll out of cable in the metro areas but it was unfeasable.

      Telstra still think like a government owned monopoly who couldn't care less about customers, or other companies it has to deal with.

  2. Not surprising by The+Original+Yama · · Score: 4, Informative

    " 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
  3. Re:Why is this a Troll? by munro · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Whitelist is the only solution by dybdahl · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  5. Actualy... by autopr0n · · Score: 3, Informative

    A couple guys in australia are responsible for a huge amount of porno spam. Including the animal stuff...

    --
    autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
  6. Re:Why is this a Troll? by evil_roy · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  7. Re:Blocking spam is good... by @madeus · · Score: 3, Informative

    AOL block 780 Million messages a day. This is 100 Million messages more than are actually delivered.

    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 .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.