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.
..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.
I mean I'm glad that the internet (AOL is the internet, right?), finally did something against these annoying aussies!
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.
" 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
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
I'm Australian, and this comment hits the nail right on the head. Telstra is a govenment approved monopoly - they can and do get away with anything.
.ISO's.
We have tiny amounts of bandwidth given to us - nevermind more bandwidth costs them almost nothing. A typical plan is one gigabyte a month. I cry when I here people from other countires casually mentioning they downloaded a few
I'm not Seth.
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."
Given that one out of every three spams that clogged up my Hotmail account for a while at least purported to be from BigPond, I can see the rationale behind the ban. However, I'm not happy with any ISP - especially AOL - deciding for me what e-mails I shall and shall not recieve. This is why I maintain my own set of filters.
Should BigPond tighten up the open relays, and go after offenders themselves? You betcha. Will they, especially after this? Hopefully. The solution to spam originating from BigPond (or anywhere else) should not involve the ISP playing Big Brother. Difficult as it might be to believe, BigPond (or Hotmail, or Yahoo) does have legitamate users who are innocent of broadcasting spam detailing how to enlarge body parts that you might not possess.
Doing my level best to piss off the religious right wing...
Telia, Sweden's largest ISP and the defacto telecoms monopoly (it was previously known as Televerket, the state monopoly telco, before it was "privatized"), was blocked by AOL a few months ago.
Personally, I think it wasn't all that bad. Apparently, the reason for the blocking was Telia's excessively poor abuse handling. This was very much due to Telia being the largest - and most arrogant - of the telcos in Sweden, and the realization that they weren't the biggest fish in the pond struck hard. Needless to say, their abuse management has improved significantly afterwards.
This only brings up the question, when will AOL realise that their pond is quite a lot bigger than they think? AOL is playing the very same arrogant I'm Holier Than Thou-game that Telia used to play on its local market. And, big as AOL might be, the Internet is a lot, lot larger.
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.
"You've lost mail"
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 is an outrage!
I'm going to take this all the way to the Prime Minister!
Hey Mr. Prime Minister!
Andy!
The practice of automatically branding everyone having a dynamic IP and sending email via their own domains. Using non-ISP email servers is not a crime.
I own several domains, a few of them for almost 9 years. In that time I have used seven or eight IPs. Only for a year or so did I have a fixed IP. I don't send spam, my servers are not open relays, but I am penalized now because I can not get a fixed IP from Verizon.
First, Osirus starts using the wirelist to block dynamic IPs, now AOL is blocking dynamic IP.
Why should I be restricted to sending mail from a verizon address? I am a business owner who has domains representing my business. Why is it wrong to want my emails to come from _my_ domain and not from Verizon?
Don't even start with the pompous BS about doing SSH tunneling, or expecting business class service for consumer prices. I don't want to hear it. I'm paying business prices for my service. So sod off. Not everyone is in a position to physically host their own on-site server or afford their own OC-3.
Is any of this blocking really going to affect the spam situation? I don't think so. Spam is economically viable because consumers continue to shop from businesses that use spam as a marketing tool. Consumers continue to buy spammed products.
Spam is not a problem that will be solved by refucing email from entire IP blocks. Spam is a consumer education problem.
If people were as quick to boycott spammed product as they have been to pour french wine in the gutter, spam would be a thing of the past.