AOL Sued For Over-Zealous Blocking

mik writes "America Online has been sued by CI Host, a Texas-based hosting company for defamation, interference with contractual rights and unfair competition. CI Host has been awarded a temporary restraining order, though AOL has apparently not complied. This may be the first such in a series of suits leading up to, perhaps, to class-action status relating to AOL's recent zealotry in anti-spam policy resulting in the presumption that shared-hosting providers are guilty (of spamming) unless proven innocent."

Comments

Stupid

[asavage]

If it is your own network and you aren't the government, you can block whatever messages you want.

At least AOL can defend itself

They should sue the spammers for $ damages

[kaltkalt]

Seriously. I realize AOL has the deep pockets, but the spammers are the cause of AOL's blocking email from the domain. The spammers, not AOL, are responsible for any monetary damages the plaintiff here suffers. Public policy dictates that AOL should be immune and the spammers who spammed from that address should be liable. Does everyone have the right to send email to AOL addresses? I would say no, although AOL should have to say "hey, when you have an account with us there are people who will be unable to email you."

Oh, the irony.

[faedle]

"C I Host is very aggressive about attacking the spam issue," Faulkner said. "C I Host does not spam, and we don't tolerate spamming by our clients," said Faulkner. "In fact, we were one of the first Web hosting companies to install spam filters that our clients cannot turn off. This week alone our spam filters blocked over 16 million spam e-mails.

Am I the only one that finds this ironic? It's not okay for AOL to filter spam, but it's okay for us to. Uh huh.

For all the "Good for AOL" people

[Kostya]

If you don't run a webhosting company or an ISP, shut up. If you run a webhosting company or an ISP, you know how crappy AOL's system is.

Consider if you have an AOL client who has a site on your hosting server. They forward their site mail to their AOL account. Their site account gets spam. What happens? Well, the spam gets forwarded, the clueless AOLer reports it as SPAM, and AOL's system sees your hosting server as a spam source. There is nothing you can do to protect your hosting server. Nothing.

This really happens. If you call AOL, they basically say it isn't their problem. If an AOL client thinks a mailing list email they signed up for is spam, then AOL thinks it is spam. They tell you to setup a feedback loop where they send spam reports, but you have no way to respond to AOL. You just get flooded with tons of reports by clueless AOL users with no way to tell AOL, "Hey, this isn't SPAM!"

Only on two occasions where a client had an exploited formmail script did the AOL system work as it should (i.e. spam was reported, we saw the report and found the problem). Every other day of the week, it is a massive time-sink that you get nothing out of.

AOL wanted to make up for sucking on the SPAM front. So they become complete asses and made the job that much harder for the rest of us. Bravo!

I hope the class-action suit makes them stop. I don't expect anyone will see any money, but at least AOL will be held accountable for being such idiots.

Re:Anti-spam zealotry is a good thing

[PktLoss]

I don't know, I am tired of over zealous spam lists, network admins, strange anti-spam mechanisms.

Recently, one of our mail servers got listed with a major spam list with a major time lag. It was allowing open relay (but was never used for nefarious purposes) 6 months ago, and this was resolved 3 months ago.

As a result, all of the mail that was sent to paying Road Runner customers was bounced back, this was mail that was requested, and mail they had just paid to receive. I attempted to forward from my ISP, but lo and behold, my personal ISP (different country than our corporate mail servers) had also been blocked by Road Runner.

I attempted to email Road Runner to get more information, but got standard auto-responders that didnt answer my question.

I ended up mailing the paying customers via my webmail account on my personal domain.

We lost about six accounts to refunds over non-recipt of information, since it took us a week to figgure out what was going on (mails are sent from an unmonitored account).

Also:
Most non-technical users don't know how to properly manage opt-in spam blockers (the ones with auto responders pointint you to websites where you can fill out all your personal information, your mothers maiden name, and perhaps the person might deem it acceptable to let your mail in). They sign up for things, dont add the posted address to their list, the mail gets blocked, so they email us complaining, not bothering to add the email address they just messaged to the allowable list. With the current virii going around, spoofing return headers, I just dont have the time to wade through all the mailer daemon/postmaster/spamblocker/virus blocker emails comming in.

ISP Level Spam blockers MUST:

• Allow users to turn them on/off
  
• Allow users to view blocked mail
  
• Provide external groups with EXACT information on why a message was blocked, rather than pawning off responsibility to some Not-For-Profit.
  
• Respond to queries from external groups within 1 business day, either with removal from lists, or more detailed information
  
• Upon removal from a blocked list, spam cached within the past week from affected senders should be forwarded with an attached apology header.