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.)"
..but this sort of action is a hurting inocent third part (ie; the other, legitimate users of mailservers in question).
It would be like stopping to deliver snailmail from another city / nation, just because someone living there sends junkmail to your city / nation. Is this something we want?
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
More and more, people are realizing that E-Mail and 'The Internet' are not services offered by AOL. They're realizing that AOL does not "own" the internet, and they're realizing that most companies don't pay AOL to host their content.
It's tough to explain to people what the internet is. AOL was a great simplification tool, in the "early days" of public access - you connect, and everything's set up for you.
Now, millions who use the internet do so from work, with their work providing the connection and their work providing their email address. What's going to happen when AOL customers get told that they can't communicate with the "outside" anymore? Easy - they shut off their AOL subscription, because it becomes meaningless. Instead of simplifying their lives, it starts hampering them.
I find it funny that AOL has adopted this policy, only because their market share has so dramatically decreaesd in the last few years. Sure, lots of people use AOL instant messenger, but if AOL starts charging for that, people will switch - I guarrentee it.
These millions of people using Kazaa, etc.? They all realize that AOL isn't providing that content. Blocking (whitelisting) email makes the fact that AOL doesn't provide the internet *extremely salient* to AOL customers: Which is, imho, a horrible, horrible business move.
America Online: So easy to overlook, no wonder it's gone bankrupt.
While I applaud AOL for trying to stop spam, cuting off a large ISP is just a bit overkill. I mean there are better ways such as tagging email though of as spam and letting the end user deleting them if wanted and only dumping them only if you are sure its spam.
Some IP blocks are nothing but spam so they are fine to block but you shouldn't use a sledgehammer to crack a nut
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
These days open relay mail servers are just plain irresponsible. Maybe 99% of the users are responsible people, but the remaining 1% are a plague on what is otherwise a wonderful achievement. We just can't afford these open relays and if it takes major ISP's like AOL to start blocking large swaths of them to end this, more power to them!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Their only observable action was to remove the abuse@bigpond.com complaints address. The sooner Telstra gets seriously LARTed, the better.
Why not build some of their own sea lines, then? I'd bet a private AU company could probably afford, and profit from a huge pipe to Japan, or even the US. But would they be allowed to make money with Telstra around?
Also, wouldn't it make sense for them to allow unlimited in-country bandwidth while capping international traffic? At my school they have an outbound cap at 200 megs a day, but you can send as much as you want on campus.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
This tool is crap:
This program (Active Spam Killer, or ASK for short) takes an "Active" approach in solving the problem: Everytime an email is received, a message is sent back to the sender asking for confirmation. If that sender does not confirm the message, it remains queued for delivery. If the sender confirms, the message is delivered and removed from the queue. The "confirmed" senders will be added to your "whitelist" and will never be sent another confirmation. Messages from these emails will always be delivered immediately . You can also specify an "ignorelist" for emails that should be always ignored and a "blacklist" that will cause a nastygram to be sent back to the sender everytime an email is received.
So how can automated mailing systems such as airline reservation confirmations and such stuff do this confirmation? My point is: whitelisting does not help at all. What if a spammer uses widely used whitelisted addresses such as newsletter From: addresses? Whitelisting does not help - I do not want people have to send mail back for confirmation - it tripples the traffic for one email by the way.
Block inbound SMTP from AOL. Set a cutoff date, nofity all of your users, and stand firm. The further they get down this path the more accepted this practice will become. Once this practice becomes accepted, it is entirely likely that other protocols will begin being blocked for other reasons (suppose the RIAA suggests that AOL block all connections to non-commercial HTTP servers to avoid piracy liability).
It is not unreasonable to see this as the first step in the stratification of the Internet into corporate sanctioned, generally accessible servers and cordoned-off slums. This is every bit as dangerous, if not more so, than government censorship.
Note: it will anger your users. I know, because it angered my users. The biggest problem was that they did not understand why. I've posted a FAQ to address their most common questions.
If we give an inch now, later they will take a yard. Better to endure a little pain now than to try to stand against the tide in a year or two.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance