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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.)"

4 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.

  2. Why is this a Troll? by Michael's+a+Jerk! · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    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 .ISO's.

    --

    I'm not Seth.

    1. 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.

  3. Re:Blocking spam is good... by gonz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    E-mail is an outdated system, and spam is only one symptom of a larger condition which includes forged headers, open relays, viruses, etc. These are not social problems, they are technical ones.

    More sophisticated spam filters are NOT the answer! More legislation is NOT the answer!

    The solution to spam is a technical one, involving distributed validation of digital certificates. If you think about it, this could be done while still preserving people's privacy, but it would require a few extensions to SMTP. It would also require a little self-regulation by the administrators (similar to relay blacklists). This is not a new idea; it's been suggested many times.

    The problem is adoption. It's the same chicken-and-egg problem seen with many other great technologies. For example, I installed PGP once, but it was useless because nobody I know uses it (and most people haven't even heard of it).

    So here's my point: Huge providers like Hotmail, AOL, Telstra, etc. are in a unique position to improve the situation. They have the power to solve the chicken-and-egg problem. If a just few of them implemented these superior technologies, the rest of the world would be encouraged to follow. PGP is a great start, but cryptographic sender validation would be even better. It would eliminate the problems of address forgery and spam more effectively than any lawsuit or heuristic or FBI raid.

    -Gonz