Slashdot Mirror
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."
And we could use more of it.
Go AOL!
Enema of my enema is ma friend.
Now we just need to put together some kind of class action suit for them spamming my regular mailbox with those damn CDs
I would agree that their filter is overzealous in this regard. Their method of filtering by magic numbers is far less reliable than filtering by inconsistency.
I manage the web and email account for the church I attend. The pastor has an aol account, so his e-mail from our server simply redirects to his aol account. Just last week, I found that we had been put on aol's blocklist for some reason - all e-mails being redirected through the server to aol were being blocked for 2 weeks by aol. Blocking messages like this results in missed personal communication. This could possibly result in lawsuits from consumers themselves.
And I'm going to enjoy watching.
CI Host is a lousy company. I had nothing but trouble with them when I was hosting there. They continued to charge me after I cancelled my account, they refused to issue refunds in a timely manner. I very nearly took them to court over it. CI Host has spammers as customers. I told them about a few that were causing problems for me, and they never did anything about them. Doesnt' surprise me, because their customer support is poor, bordering on non-existant.
AOL is going to turn around and clean them out in court, and I'm going to thoroughly enjoy it. All they have to do is point to a few CI Host customers that spam, and that CI Host has been notified of several times, and it will either be a wash (in which case, AOL wins because they can stand the legal fees better than CI Host), or AOL will be able to counter-sue without a problem and make CI Host feel the hurt. Either way, I say yay AOL, which is something that I don't often say.
-Todd
"The details of my life are quite inconsequential..."
At least AOL can defend itself
I had the misfortune of having a dedicated server with them for 2 long years. The machine would lock up frequently, and i'd have to make a 30min call from Australia to the US to listen to their on hold crap so i could talk to a tech and then try and convince him to hit the big red button.
CI Host has a huge marketing and sales department and tiny tech support division. Dont you dare, ever, believe a word of their marketing crap. They suck. Pure and simple. They've cost me thousands because of the clients i've lost because of their incompetence. Some of the people are nice enough but they simply dont have the technical skills of other places.
I'm now with rackspace.com and they kick arse!
I'd rather spam filtering be left to myself. Any decent e-mail client has the capability for filtering, and by doing that way, I have control over what gets thrown out and what doesn't. I would not trust AOL to tell my what e-mail I should and shouldn't read. That, of course, is one of the many reasons why I would never be an AOL customer.
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."
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
I personally think it is good that someone is trying to block spam. Now if they could validate forged headers.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Don't be to quick to defend them.
0 27 3.html is another link.
http://www.forumhosts.com/cihost.htm for a taste of what these guys are like.
http://www.stevemaas.com/selbstbild/archives/00
Let's hope to god the EFF's and Timothy don't fall for their lawsuit stuff.
More of AOL's anti-spam zealotry is a good thing (I speak as someone who has had something like 10,000 emails blocked by them in the past few weeks).
Been with CI Host for awhile, pretty good network, really like the price too.
Also, AOL/RR is blocking email from my office (Sprint SHDSL, fiber optic DSL, faster than T1, business only stuff in case you weren't aware). Ever since I got the first bounced message AOL has been #1 on my shit list.
Bravo, CI Host, Bravo.
Being as I at one time worked in the abuse capacity for a ISP. Although AOL may have over zealous policies as of late they do have a postmaster number which they could call and have the validity of the block checked. I had done this in the past and had resolution in ~24hours.
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.
Just do a quick /. search to see what people think of ci host. I was a ci host customer back in 99/2000 when their whole accounting database was open to the internet, customer information and credit card numbers. There were $5000 of fraudulent charges on my check card around the turn of millenium from my information being readily available to any idiot with a web browser. The bank took care of everything but it was a pain the in ass.
C I Host, one of the world leaders in Web hosting and Internet solutions, was awarded a temporary restraining order against America Online
I can't be the only one that finds the concept of an online restraining order more than a little amusing.
The coolest voice ever.
I still hate spammers though.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
spews.org
(and indirectly osirusoft.com)
selwerd.cx
blars.org
bl.reynolds.net.au
Personally I choose to use block lists that have clear open operating policies, including clear adding and removal methods. A small sample include:
spamcop.net
ordb.org
proxies.relays.monkeys.org
opm.blitzed.org
This is certainly not a comprehensive list, but it is a good start. A good comprehensive list is at: http://www.declude.com/JunkMail/Support/ip4r.htm
And most importantly, READ THE POLICIES OF THE BL *BEFORE* USING IT. The last thing you want is to start using a BL, only to find most of Asia, or big ISPs, are among the ones blocked, and you're losing legitimate email.
**FREE** Track and view your phone's via CellID and/or WIFI and/or GPS
I would be supicious too of any shared hosts. I don't see them doing much to prevent it on their end.
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.
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
Do you really trust AOL to filter spam and emails for you? Then good for you - you can join the other 35 million idiotic users who think AOL is the internet and have no clue what a "actual" ISP is.
You must master your joystick like a fisherman masters bait! - Gimpy
I don't recall there being anything that says an ISP has to accept email from someone. It seems more like the accepted business idea of reserving the right to refuse service to anyone.
I am on a small ip block, with losers that catch the latest winshit worm and start spamming every few weeks.
Because of this, AOL has blocked my mailserver despite 7 requests to whitelist it (3 from myself, 4 from AOL victims^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hconsumers). It gets whitelisted for a few days, then group punishment kicks in and it's blacklisted again.
I have never spammed, I never intend to spam. Getting accused of sending half a billion unrequested emails in half an hour from a upstream as small as mine is both hilarious and insulting.
Fighting spam is one thing, blanket bombing to prevent spam is quite another. If anyone at the evil empire's apprentice is reading, "Hope you're glad that my dad left you because of your stunts. See you in court."
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
From: State District Judge Bonnie Sudder jbsudder@state.texas.us
To: legal@aol.com; abuse@aol.com
Subject: AOL, Save Thousands in Under One Minute! Quickest Quote!
Dear AOL,
This is your chance to opt-out of a completely unique program! You May Be Closer (Maybe Hours Away) To Financial Punishments than you think...
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Block and bounce all AOL senders with the same result codes. AOL users will complain so much to their phone support AOL will change their ways.
Anti-spam zealotry is a good thing
A good friend of mine is no longer able to send her regular op-ed piece to AOLers due to anti-spam zealotry. She can't reply to her subscribers when they write and ask why she's stopped sending it. She's even blocked from emailing AOL tech support to ask why she's blocked in the first place.
Arbitrarily cutting off an entire ISP with the inexplicable finality AOL has shown towards several ISPs isn't making the world a better or more spam-free place.
Repeat after me: arrogant zealotry is a bad thing, and we could use less of it.
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face, it's just a goddamned piece of paper!" - George W. Bush Nov. 2005
No one should require me to carry your traffic. If AOL doesn't wish to carry someone elses traffic who should make them? How AOL runs their servers is their business. No one should be able to require a shared hosting provider to not provide services to spammers either. I used to be hosted at a provider who hosted spammers. When I found out I asked them if they were planning on removing the spammers, they said no, i moved hosting providers.
Hmm. I personally hate the idea of contributory infringement, i.e. holding an ISP liable for the copyright infringement of a client, and this would be somewhat like that. But maybe ISPs should be liable for the spammings of a client (foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds). Have statutory damages (say, $10 per email) and hold the ISP liable for that amount, for each spam email sent from its servers (payable to the recipient of the email). This will give all ISPs a financial incentive to do more than sign up everyone with a credit card number and maybe kick off people who are reported to be spammers. They need to be more proactive (of course the ISP could sue the spammer for indemnity to cover the cost of the tens of millions of dollars the ISP had to pay due to the millions of spams the former customer/spammer sent out through its servers). Spammer can't afford to pay? Time to create special spammer debtor-prison.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
I mean really, this could easily be levied against anyone blocking spam in that case. If its their servers and their bandwidth and you're violating their terms of service, I don't see why they HAVE to deliver email or anything else. Heck MSN is effectively blocking linux with the way they respond to search results through their search engines and you couldn't bring a court case against them about that. If CI Host (which really DOES suck and consists of mostly spam and porn hosts)) can't contain their customers - why would AOL be liable if they choose to protect their systems? Last I heard the laws about Cybertresspass (the very laws AOL used to sue spammers - denial of chattel) were in AOL's favor - not CI Hosts'.
Honestly guys.. I worked as an Assistant Administrator for an ISP in Michigan. AOL's block list is not that bad. I had a very aggressive list of spam. We actively sent letters to our users telling them to forward us spam, and if legit spam, we added the address to our spam filter. The ONLY ISP that ever affected us by blocking us, was MSN, when MSN.com and Hotmail.com blocked our ISP when their software was messing up. We got our domain unblocked and everything was fine. I support Aggressive blocklists.
AOL blocks sites with SMTP banner, that doesnt match
RDNS. Its likely the cause of the block.
$ telnet 63.249.159.33 25
Trying 63.249.159.33...
Connected to cihost.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 cassiopeia.propagation.net ESMTP Sendmail 8.11.6/8.11.6; Mon, 25 Aug 2003 20:05:09 -0500
Among other petty annoyances, AOL is incorrectly refusing connections from blacklisted hosts, as follows:
According to RFC 821 (sections 4.3 and 4.2.2), the server can respond to new connections in with a 220 ("let's dance") or a 421 ("go away, I have a headache") response. Not a 554 ("you're lousy in bed") code. Among other things, the manner in which they reject mail from residential IPs causes it to languish in the queue, rather than bouncing as it should if they intend to permanently refuse delivery.
I'm sure they do this intentionally so that it will look like your mail server is at fault ("sorry, couldn't get through") rather than theirs ("buzz off, I don't like your IP address").
I think a vast majority of slashdotters are on AOL's side in this situation (regardless of what they think of AOL). Aggressive spamblocking is a good thing. AOL can block whoever the fuck it wants to. If it wants to block *@*.* it sure as fuck can. There is a built-in check on aggressiveness of spamblocking. If you block too much then your customers will start to miss valid emails and they'll start to complain, then they'll start to leave if you don't fix it. If AOL deems their current blacklist acceptable, more power to them. Fuck spam.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
C I was blocked starting on August 12th, and the temporary restraining order was issued August 21st. How come Red Hat or IBM or any other interested party can't act with such celerity in getting SCO to close its trap?
Hammer time.
That was classic intercourse!
For those thinking that CIHost sounds like some insane overlitigous company that tries to use lawsuits to make its profit... You're right. :)
:) You can play with the search and creative misspellings, and you'll find a lot of posts about them.
I spend some time at WebHostingTalk.com (a huge forum site for web hosting), and they have a horrible reputation. Actually, you can't search for "CIHost" -- it's banned, apparently due to WHT itself being threatened with legal actions because of posts about CIHost in the forums. But I've read some posts about "See Eye Host" and such.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
"a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, adored by little statesment, philospohers and divines." - Emerson
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
CI Host has spammers? I seem to recall it's against their AUP. I've got a couple sites hosted there (and have been there for a couple years now), never had a problem with them as some have said.
Honestly - I hate them, I hate AOL. I despise them. They disgust me. I'm going to have to punish my fingers for typing the last sentance of this post. I'll prolly stick them in boiling oil till my bones cook.
Gah.
AOL can block whomever they want to with no repurcussions, they own the portal.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
I have a static IP block on DSL, and I'm getting blocked by Road Runner (rr.com) but not AOL. Go figure.
If you're using postfix, just tweak your transport config to route aol.com or rr.com emails through you're ISPs mail server, unless you're unfortunate enough to have an ISP that denies any From: addresses that aren't @yourisp.com
I hope they win this one. First of all, CI Host are a bunch of f$cking spambags. Second of all, it'll be a dark day when a court forces someone to carry unwanted traffic. AOL owns their own network. AOL can decide who they want or don't want to accept mail from, for whatever reason AOL wants. If AOL customers don't like AOL's decision, they'll leave, and AOL will lose in the market. Oddly enough, only spammers seem to have any trouble grasping the fact that a network owner can restrict what flows over said network for any reason at all.
Free advice to CI Host: Your legal action has just landed you permanently on hundreds of private blocklists. I know of at least 5. You and your customers now going to have a lot more trouble getting your mail deliverd to many more places than AOL. Find a new line of work because no netblock you are associated with will ever be useful for email, which you indicate to be your main line of business in your lawsuit. Cut your losses and get off the net now. Sell your equipment on eBay. Sell your netblocks back to ARIN. Do something productive. You'll be happier if you avoid the world of frustration you just entered. Just unplug instead.
.sig: file not found
So, given that their users have signed up consenting to this, the only people who can legitimately be pissed, are third parties - who have no right to use AOL's network at all.
nutter.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I find this a frightening attitude. Often it is the least desirable who need the most protection of the law. In other words: What value is a legal system that defends only the popular and righteous? After all, if you're popular, you're not going to need defending. A true civilization defends the weak, the unpopular, the undesirable, and yes, even the unsavory.
All that should matter here is the merits of the case. Your experience with CI Host might lead you to believe that they're playing fast-and-loose, and maybe that'd be right. We can agree that a slimy company shouldn't be rewarded for slimy actions.
If their beef with AOL is legitimate -- and heaven knows, I'm not fit to judge that -- but if it is, then of course they deserve whatever relief the court can offer. And of course, it's the court's role to make that determination.
I'll defend anyone who legitimately needs it -- past behavior notwithstanding. We all should.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
I work for an ISP (holding the name for obvious reasons). We recently had a customer abuse our AUP by sending 3,000+ unsolicited emails with attachments to AOL customers in just one week (total emails reached ~18,000). AOL in turn blocked any and every email with attachments from our domain indefinitely. Our legal team is now trying to resolve this issue with them. Even though emails without attachments go through fine, it has become a huge inconvience for many our customers. I don't understand why they did not block the specific account only instead of our domain. The following is the rejection notice we receive when sending emails with attachments to *@aol.com: > ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors ----- > > > ----- Transcript of session follows ----- > ... while talking to mailin-02.mx.aol.com.:
> ... while talking to mailin-03.mx.aol.com.:
> >>> QUIT
It was already tried with CompuServe vs Cyberpromotions where the judge ruled that a server/admin has the right to block any traffic or spam/email/connections from accessing theirs.
/dev/null who works at abuse@ . No morals whatsoever.
CI HOST is a notorious spamhaven and I would love to show that CI HOST is indeed tolerant of their spamming customers and do jack about booting or disconnecting them. They have
IF they dont' want to play nice on the net, then they will be delgated to the corner until they do. Or suffer the interne equivalent of a death sentence; be happy in your intranet CI Host. You haven't been allowed on my networks for the last 2 years; think this lawsuit is gonna help ya much?
I've been a happy CI Host customer for almost two years. My domain gets very little traffic, but the few times I've had to call for support, they've been quick and very helpful.
AOL needs this law asap.
How clever. Now run along and finsh your homework... bed time soon.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I know it's supposed to be easy to forge a "from" address in the header of an e-mail. This is a favorite spammer trick.
Would one of you folks enlighten me on whether it's possible to easily forge or otherwise disguise a "bcc" or other portion of the "to" section?
I operate a website (hosted by a third party provider) that's been hammered this past week by someone who vainly hopes to exploit Formmail. He takes an unseemly interest in the cgi-bin and cgi-sys directories and is cheeky enough to blind-copy an e-mail address at AOL with the results.
He won't get anywhere because I haven't got Formmail installed, but he is as aggravating as hell, and not a little scary.
AOL's attitude is that if he is indeed one of their subscribers, he's entitled to their protection, and they won't lift a finger no matter what he's doing or who he's injuring. In other words, if you've got a commercial site and it's third-party hosted, you're fair game for any of their bad kids who wish to harm you, forge your domain name, or whatever, under the guise and protection of AOL. I was told this at about 5:30 p.m. today by one of their "customer service" representatives.
Before I talked to them, I was primarily annoyed. Now I'm really angry. I'd like to enhance my knowledge about this as I consider what to do. Knowledge is power; it's just sometimes difficult to acquire adequate knowledge while you've got so much else to do.
Thanks!
Anne
DUCT TAPE: The Election Supervisors' Secret Weapon
You're citing an out-of-date RFC. 821 was superseded by RFC 2821, which makes it clear that 554 is a valid connection-opening response, to indicate that mail service is not available. (Indeed, 2821 spells out two codes for use at connection establishment -- 220 to accept, or 554 to reject access.) AOL is correctly using 554 to indicate that it will not provide mail service to your IP address.
A 4xx code would be improper in this case. 4xx codes indicate temporary failures. They mean that the client should queue its messages and retry them later, rather than returning a bounce message to the sender. That's not what is intended here -- the server doesn't want you to retry, it wants you to not try. A 5xx error code is correct.
EarthLink's new challenge-response system continues to kick ass. :)
I received this yesterday - To my surprise it appears that Roadrunner neither advised their customers that such a thing was about to happen, nor do they provide an opt-out mechanism. (reason: 550 5.7.1 Mail Refused - dsl.snfc21.pacbell.net_Residential_Range - See http://security.rr.com/residential.htm - 030813d)
Are the people here who say that AOL has the right to do what they like with their own network the same people oppsed to telcom deregulation? If so, you're a hypocrite.
There's a difference between a user blocking email and an ISP. Please, tell me you realize the difference between USERS and ISPs. Do you really want the internet to become this big wasteland and firewalls and obstacles and general closed-ness? By taking this kind of control over the (supposedly free and open) INTERNET you destroy what makes it so fuckin great.
Don't fall for this bullshit about spam. They shouldn't be blocking ANY legitimate emails, it's that simple. Blocking an entire domain is wrong and just plain bad for the internet, especially when the blocking is arbitrary.
Now, the end users (such as your dad) definitely have the option to switch providers
/28 is being used for spamming.
This is what you blacklist zealots (read: SPEWS junkies) just don't get -- many of us do NOT have a choice to move from our current service provider, for all intents and purposes. If you have more than just an extremely simple network, moving from one colo to another is a hugely expensive project, both in terms of time AND money.
You are shifting the burden of spam from you to me, when we should be shifting the burden to the spammer by blocking THE SPAMMER. Not LEGITIMATE COMPANIES.
It is one thing to block IP addresses that spammers are using. It is quite another to block an entire class C just because one
The collateral damage argument is bullshit. If you sign a colo agreement with a company, even if you wanted to expend the time and money to move your (otherwise working) network to a different provider, YOU WILL GET SCREWED OUT OF MONEY by the contract.
Sorry for the rant, but you pathetic assholes at SPEWS and similar blacklists deserve a taste of your own medicine. I eagerly await the day you get your just desserts!
Never having heard of them, I looked on Google Groups.
Maybe AOL users don't want to become Millionaire Traders, join the Big Money Downline Club, or read a free $3600 Money Game Report.
There seems to be a lot of sightings on news.admin.net-abuse.sightings of SPAM sent by CI Host to advertise their services.
There are 2 kinds of people in this world: Those who write in decimal and those who don't
So you jump from one raging fire into another? Does anyone know the meaning of RESEARCHING your hosts prior to signing a contract with them?
Spamhaus.org - Rackspace.com listings
Google archived
The FTC brought an antitrust complaint against a company (can't remember which one at the moment) in the 70's (I think). In that case, the target company had around 65% of the market, and it was ruled that that was insuffecient to be a monopoly. In this case, I don't think AOL has anywhere near 65%. 30 million customers (what AOL claims to have, but they were recently accused of inflating that) is small compared to the number of ISP subscribers; laughably so to be called a monopoly
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
You guys are so wrong. This is wrong. They're effectively destroying exactly what makes the internet great. Don't you fuckin defend that.
AOL has not guaranteed delivery of email to it's servers (see the terns and conditions for SMS).
They will not have guaranteed delivery of emails to others servers.
At best you may be able to get a refund through threatening them with false advertising (if and only if they made or reasonably implied a service that they did not fulfill).
Legally there is nothing wrong with a ping only ISP as long as it is not misrepresented to the potential customers.
Q.
Insert Signature Here
One of our TD guys posted the following:
We just finished a conversation with staff from AOL's postmaster team. We have an agreement, but it may or may not be satisfactory to users.
First, let me say what they are doing. They have a button on their mail software that lets users report email as spam. They check to see the host
from which AOL got the mail, i.e. the previous hop. In principle, if they get a significant number of complaints for any given host, they refuse to accept mail from it. In practice, there is sometimes human review, although they don't guarantee to do that. In practice, they will often alert abuse@rutgers.edu before cutting off mail, although they don't promise to do that either. They will, however, allow us to give them a list of our major MTA's, and exempt that list. What we believe they will do reliably is notify us after the fact when they have cut an IP address off. We will dispatch those reports to the liaison.
They should have most of the major MTA's by now. However we don't have a complete list of all MTA's on campus, so it is certainly possible that in
the future some might be cut off. If that happens, we will find out about it after the fact. In some cases, the abuse staff may recognize it as an
MTA, and ask them to add it to the list. However we won't always know the way departments use systems, and thus cases might occur where we would have to depend upon responses from the system administrator.
Note that in principle they could remove systems that send announcements to the user community, if users report the messages from the President or
other official email as spam. They regard the customers as right, and accept their definition of spam. In practice, that system will be on the
list of MTA's. For the moment they look OK.
There are some systems that were on earlier lists that we have been unable to understand. In one case we verified that they had no forwarding entries pointing to AOL. The system itself is not an open relay, and being Solaris, would not have been contaminated by Sobig. In the discussion today, it didn't seem possible to develop an understanding of what had led to these systems being considered problematical. However those systems are MTA's, and should not be cut off in the future.
They have offered to send us all email from any Rutgers host that users report as spam, so we can review it and try to forestall any problems.
Since this is in the thousands per day during periods when problems are occuring, we are not currently taking them up on this. In the opinion of our staff, if AOL can't afford the staff time to do intelligent review of their own users' reports, we can't do that job for them.
In this situation, I recommend that no system administrator use AOL for email, since we need to make sure we can contact sysadmins no matter what
decisions AOL might have made. Other uses with critical need for mail connectivity might want to do the same. Also, it might be useful for users
to understand that they should be careful about reporting as spam mail that comes through Rutgers.
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
Today's Monday. Is Monday a 1 or a 0?
Monday is definately a zero.
7,900 references of abuse alone from Rackspace.com archived at Googles Groups ( news.admin.net-abuse.* )
8 SBL listings at Spamhaus.org
Remember you get what you pay for. IF the deal sounds to be good to be true...insert next cliche.
Over the past week, AOL has been blocking SMTP from most of our network, and it has caused a LOT of problems. As with any ISP or Hosting provider, you will get problematic users (spammers). These people are scum, we hate them just as /. users hate them. The abuse policy is pretty strict, plus we have a bunch of anti-spam techniques in place (such as a 20 recipient limit in sendmail.cf for shared servers), and things like that, but it's not going to stop some jerk from getting a dedicated server and flooding the world with mail. They're caught pretty quickly and terminiated (and we now subscribe to spamcop's RBL for blocking).
ANYWAY - now that I'm far off subject, let me get back to AOL. We tried calling AOL plenty of times and were hung up on repeatedly. So as a temp workaround, we made a server specifically for relaying mail to AOL. All the servers would relay all mail through it, and when it detected it was blocked, it would change it's base IP and keep on going. Kinda sneaky but a lot of people send email to aol users, and regular good-hearted customers call much more than spammers, so we had to do something. It's always fun listening to a spammer bleed his/her heart out, wanting you to turn them back on...
CI Host has a lot of great people working there. Sometimes the views/decisions of upper management don't make a lot of sense. Such as spamming users to switch service to CI. But I'll shut up before I see an Employee Update email and my badge stops working.
Of course I've heard of tortious interference. And IANAL, but under any reasonable definition of tortious interference AOL's behavior is not. The mere fact that someone's activity injures someone else's business does not constitute tortious interference[1]. AOL is not going out and interfering with CI Host's email. They are simply refusing to take the action of accepting and storing it on their own servers. CI host has no agreement with AOL for AOL to accept, store and forward CI host's mail. When CI Host's customers contact AOL to ask why AOL does not accept their messages, AOL replies that the netblock has been linked to abusive traffic and that they blame CI Host for that. The only possible way tortious interference could occur here is if AOL were to approach CI Host's customers with the intent of destroying CI Host's business; the fact that CI Host customers approached AOL and asked their opinion changes everything.
[1] For example, if you charge people $5 to park their cars on my property, and I erect a fence to stop you from doing so, I have clearly interfered with your business but not committed tortious interference. In fact, you're lucky I didn't prosecute you for trespassing. Though it's an electronic trespass, the spam situation is similar.
.sig: file not found
They're plenty helpful until you have an actual problem that requires real effort on their part to fix. Then they refuse to talk to you. My rant on my attempt to get a 1Mbit line installed is posted at
The Rabbit Hole
under August 7th. As a result of their stupidity and with-holding information that was necessary in my decision for the second line to begin with (if I had known I couldn't get 1Mbit I would have canceled the entire order) I'm giving them the finger and going with Cox digital cable for my internet connection and moving my web-server to colo with my ISP which is very helpful even when problems are not so small.
There's always "good company" "evil company" stories because it depends on the problems you have. I had no real opinion of Qwest after using them for nearly 3 years until I tried to get the 1Mbit line. Now I'll go out of my way to not use them for anything. I understand that big problems happen occasionally and I have no issue with that. But I refuse to deal with a company that can't handle those big problems in a professional manner.
I'd hate to be a Qwest customer the next time a big problem comes up and so I'm going to make sure I'm not.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Unrestricted spamming?
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
Advertisers or spammers, these morons ignore the fact that NO ONE is obligated to carry their traffic it there is a reason to believe that it is not legit.
I drop that kind of traffic on the floor. They're welcome to TRY to collect. I guarantee they won't like my legal retalliation..
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
Your days are numbered? ;-)
http://jesus.everdense.com/
So, CIHOST's CEO is allowed to sue people because they've proven to be unscrupulous, but they won't allow people to block mail from this unscrupulous netspace?
Hey, you lie down with dogs, don't be mad if you get fleas.
If a company refuses to act on the abuse coming from their systems, there are no "legitimate" anythings coming out of that netspace.
THERE is a neat little invention called the telephone; invented by some bloke called Bell. Did wonders you know.
Hey, here's a thought.... maybe the separate individuals of the quarter-million slashdot readers have coherent opinions within themselves, but the contradictory opinions are being posted by *gasp* different people.
Shocking thought... pure madness, I know. Who could even suggest that a couple hundred thousand people who happen to read the same news site could possibly form separate, differing views about world events? (Answer: Me, sarcastically.)
But no, I like your thinking better. Every single reader of slashdot is part of a single unified Borg-collective consciousness. Unfortunately, that single consciousness is schizophrenic and can't agree with itself on any significant issue, and the resulting logic error will cause a catastrophic system failure.
I might have modded your nonsense up as "Funny", but nobody did that. It's 100% "Insightful" so far. How can this be?? Unless... you were actually trying to be serious with that post. (!) How disturbing...
Sometimes the best solution to morale problems is just to fire all the unhappy people.
This week alone I have had to work on 3 boxes that had AOL on them and all were a huge pain in the ass. Anytime AOL has a legal problem I can only hope that someone sues them into oblivion and I will never have to see a stupid interface like that again.
**** END NASTY AOL RANT ****
Stay tuned for new sig...
So now the only way to send email to AOL is to use a server that is Echelon monitored?
Isn't it bad enough that most people in the world use AOL or Hotmail, Yahoo or another major email providor with large wedges of mistrust hanging round their necks?
I see a solution to this as being for everyone with the ability to do so, giving everyone they knwo with AOL an account on their server. Remember quotas, and make sure your server is secure, get your IP blocking fingers ready and lets peer2peer email!
Its our internet, why let AOL and MS and all those big guys tell us how to use it?
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
Not being an AOL luser, I wouldn't know, but I'd be shocked if the contract didn't have language that nixed consequential damages (ie, I lost a business deal because by email got blocked).
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
What if you look at it from a slightly different angle? AOL is abusing its place in the market by trying to indirectly regulate Internet communications and by that mean deserves a slap on the wrist like any other monopoly.
People on AOL expect to receive "Internet" email. And that's what's being advertised. How do you explain that the reason why they didn't receive an invoice from your website is because their provider went a bit berserk on the filtering?
For God's sake, if they want a private network, let them do it. But they should clearly advertise that their version of email is not the same one everybody else uses.
AOL's spam hypocracy really is anti-competitive behavior. Blocking mail from all hosting vendors is rude. When I got a cheap dial up account, mail to my own mom got blocked. It made me very angry as I'd done nothing wrong and my ISP had just as rigourous an anti-spam policy as anyone. When they threatened to blacklist my Cable provider, Cox, unless Cox blocked outbound port 25 except through their own SMTP server, I saw it as raw predatory practice. There's got to be a better way to stop spam from broken M$ boxes than reducing everyone's service to the limits of M$ Windoze on a dial up account. I hope CI host can show that their record is just as good or better than any ISP's and clean AOL's clock.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I have a personal blog domain that I use to keep my family and friends updated about my life. Since I have moved alot it has been a great way of keeping open the lines of communication. However, recently, AOL has stopped letting my updates reach my 2 Aunts in Mass. And it is pretty annoying. I appreciate the fact that AOL is trying to cut down on SPAM - but damn! Gimme a break - let me SPAM their server first before they ban my domain. I only send about 2 emails a month (one to each aunt) to their servers.. Seems like AOL spent more effort blocking me than I did emailing their pop servers.
Because I sure as hell block any mail originating from their cesspool of an IP range.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
One click and your there, what a joke. I love the MSN tv adds about how much better their service is.
My favourite trick is to walk up to a brain dead windows users computer when they are not around and do ctrl-a then enter. An old windows 98se desktop with 30-40 short cuts all starting up at once it is a hoot to watch! I got kicked out of a few computer stores that do not lock their desktops for doing it......what a riot, I just use to tell the pimple faced sales kid "I don't know what happened I pressed some keys and thats what happened!" Ah the good old days.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
There is no arbitrary about it. If the ISP hosts spammers and refuses to take them offline, then that ISP gets to experience the "financial incentive". This is because they are using "financial incentive" to host spammers. Since spamming steals resources even when the spammer is blocked (all that spam checking still has to be done), the necessary solution is for the ISPs that host spammers to terminate their services. Anyone who pays money to an ISP that continues to host these spammers is part of the problem in an indirect way. If those people would leave that bad ISP and switch to a good ISP, eventually the ISPs that host spammers would either have only spammers as customers, or would go out of business, or would realize their huge mistake and take some action to get rid of the spammers.
And yes, I do have the entirety of CIHOST and a few other ISPs blocked at my own network.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Umm... If a preliminary injunction was won by CIHost last Friday, shouldn't AOL have at least reviewed the suit even if they didn't wish to represent themselves in court?
I AM, therefore I THINK!
What if I charge some $12.99 a month to be able to send email to her grandkids, and you block her from doing that, because you have a problem with a completely unrelated business relationship of mine ? Aren't you kind of holding the innocent customers hostage ? I don't like Microsoft, but I still think it would be a crime to write a virus to destroy people's data just because they did chose to use Windows.
I don't block her from sending anything; I merely refuse to accept traffic from certain parts of the net that are known to generate abusive traffic. If she's sending mail from those parts of the net, I may reject her mail. She should complain to you to stop supporting spam. She has no recourse towards me, however. Her grandkids, on the other hand (who presumably in your analogy pay me for email services) may have a grievance with me. If I am providing their service and don't allow traffic that they desire through, they should demand that I fix the service or demand a refund and leave. If I am competent, I will make my block more granular. If you support spammers, though, and your customers who pay $12.99 know that, they are not so "innocent". They are benefitting from your spam support (by getting below-market rates for connectivity which, incidentally, is sub-par because of your spammer support) and should choose a more reputable provider.
I am, by and large, "just blocking the spam". Some parts of the net are so spammy that it is more efficient for me to block them off altogether and resolve issues as my users bring them to my attention. Believe it or not, my users appreciate this. [FYI, I have been known to whitelist addresses, but only at my users' requests, not as a result of spammy senders' demands. It's happened twice in the past couple million messages.] (I am not AOL, BTW.)
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If that's so, then AOL is like a crack whore, acting incoherent, making no sense and mindlessly harming innocent people to gratify themselves.
Don't confuse that with me approving in any way of their incompetance... they are two comlpetely seperate issues.
What makes you think they don't want to run off independent hosters so that they can rule the market themselves? Sounds like using your muscle in one market to lever yourself into another market. They are not competing on quality of service, they are simply throwing their weight around. That's predatory behavior of a kind they have been warned not to commit.
It's you who needs to seperate your issues. If CI Host is not really any worse than any other ISP for generating spam, then AOL is simply deviding up the network for their own good. Then it's not a case of blocking a known spammer, it's a case of blocking a competitor. This does not even take into accont that the network is a public place and that if AOL would attach itself to it and proffit, they must abide by common ground rules.
ISPs need to get at the root of the problem rather than punish innocent people. I consider all large ISPs big spammers because they largly cater to Windoze boxes that get owned 7 ways till sunday and spam all day long, regardless of how slow their connection. ISPs that tollerate that kind of shit, or even promote it with Windoze only client software, are bad citizens of the net. AOL, M$N, and most large ISPs are all guilty of this kind of irresponsible behavior. It's time for a change that's not making everyone's connection to the web equivalent to a Windoze95 dial up account.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Is that what they're calling jr high now down at the trailer park?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Historically, AOL has viewed itself as an entertainment company. The AOL muckity mucks cared about the big business deals, the marketing drive that will change the world, etc. The media mogul in Barton Fink is an example of the style of executive that ran the show during the height of the dot.com bubble.
But AOL Email Operations was just another overworked technical dept. The email application didn't bring in any revenue directly. Also, it was an overhead application that couldn't be cleanly assigned into one of the Balkanized divisions at AOL. For years, it had little marketing and little development effort applied to it. Buying Netscape for $4 billion dollars got lots of attention, upgrading the pre-internet AOL email infrastructure didn't.
The top level AOL exec's heard about spam complaints, but they heard lots of complaints about lots of things. Nothing was catching on fire and exploding in email so they assumed it must not have been that bad.
Another reason why AOL business exec's tended to ignore the techies. Keep in mind that hardcore techies had spent years vehemently ragging on AOL. Inspite of that, AOL became a major business success (well, at least for a few years). So whenever an internet purist gave a lecture on how things were supposed to be done, it triggered a gut level hostile response with many exec's at AOL.
So the result of all of this is, for the past several years, there were only background projects for fighting spam (and handling ISP complaints). Current problems are a result of that legacy.
But I think things might be changing. Remember AOL tried to takeover Time Warner? Well Time Warner has essentially staged a reverse coup and kicked out all the "deal junkies" at AOL. I think the Time Warner folks are pushing a much more back to basics approach for business deals, financial accounting, and for the AOL online service.
The upcoming AOL 9.0 release is supposed to be a lot better at spam fighting (although I haven't tried it much yet).
I hope that the new exec's really are making spam fighting a strategic priority (which I think they might be). If so, you should see real results in a year or two. Including, hopefully, a lot less false positives for spam (where positive really means negative delivery of mail, whatever) and much higher levels of support for email delivery complaints.
Ben in DC
"It's the mark of an educated mind to be moved by statistics" Oscar Wilde
AOL owns all their equipment, and they're paying the (no doubt substantial) monthly bills for electricity, bandwidth, etc. They have absolute authority to operate their stuff any way they choose. If they want to block mail from some other ISP because they don't like the color of the admin's car, well... they can do it. That's the way the Internet, as a whole, operates.
Now, with that said... If they start losing customers because of their blocking policies, I'll wager that they'll rethink said policies in a big hurry.
Now, with all THAT said... I've done a little research. It seems that AOL's accusations that CIHost is a spammer are not entirely unfounded. From what I found, it seems they were spamming their own hosting services less than a year ago. More recently, around the beginning of July, it appears that they provided spam support services.
There are numerous other instances, dating from 2000-2002, from the Google Groups search for the group news.admin.net-abuse.email. In short, it would appear that CIHost, while the number of recent reports seems to have slacked off, may still not be completely free of spammer infestation themselves.
They would be very wise to clean their own house before they start yelling "Foul!" about other ISPs doing nothing more than exercising their private property rights.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Yes, they have tightened their policies...
If enough users report messages coming from a host as spam the automated AOL system takes over...
First it checks if the reverse DNS for the host is correct. If not, you go right on to the blocked list.
If your reverse DNS is correct they supposedly contact you and ask you to stop spamming. If you don't, they block you.
The blocks usually last a week and according to AOL Postmaster staff, cannot be overridden.
My only difficulty with this is that you can get on the list for one user abusing your system, even in one day and then be stuck without a connection to AOL for over a week.
The engineers there told us that the new policies (as few as a handful of spam reports can trigger this action) had produced TONS of complaints and requests to be removed from the blocks, thus slowing the process even more.
RateVegas.com - Vegas Reviews
No. Openness, in standards and in access, is what makes the internet so great.
Sure there is. After all, many of the spammers who use these open proxies are being tracked down and documented in ROKSO, part of the Spamhaus Project. However, this tracking does require using resources other than just header analysis and traceroute.
The investigators use methods more akin to a private detective's or law office's methods than to a network administrator's. For instance, they follow the money. The majority of spam messages are trying to sell something, so they need an avenue to collect payments. Or they use public records: many spam messages flog Web sites, which may well have spurious whois contact information, but are registered in the name of a legally-established corporation or LLC. (Spammers incorporate for the same reason anyone else does: when they get sued, it protects their personal assets.) In this case, the investigators can go to the state corporations records. These are public records, which list the officers of the corporation -- in other words, the spammers.
Take a look at the ROKSO records for any major spammer, like Eddy Marin or Ronnie Scelson. ROKSO records are compiled entirely from public information -- corporate records, legal filings, domain registrations, and so forth. They also represent a tremendous amount of work on the part of Steve Linford, Shiksaa, and other investigators. Tracking spammers is not necessarily something you can do from your xterm, but it is possible, and it is being done.
I hate to be the one to say this but I think AOL has this right. As an owner of a network, internal or etc. I have the right to block any content I wish, even if my motive are questionable, if aol was to loose this case, which I don't see how they could, it would set a dangerous precident for any network owner, administrator, or provider.
I hope the third little piggy got mad cow - ^_^
...for, as Timothy himself says, "anything which slows down spam can only be a good thing."0 3/08/25/0 024204&mode=nested&tid=111&tid=126&tid=95)
(http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=
Maybe there are things that slow down spam that are not good?
-Lars
All I know is that CI Host is a worthless hate spreading worm garden. My host, OC Hosting (ochosting.com), bless their souls they are such wonderfull people to be a client of, has had trouble with CI Host in the past.
About a year ago when OC Hosting pulled out of renting space at CI's data centers, CI told them that they couldn't get in the building even to take their machines out without signing a year contract for the space they used. Because of this I (foreverdreaming.net) and other OC customers could not get our files because CI was holding the servers.
After this I have had a constantly living anamosity for CI that ignighted like a torch when I read this article. I hope AOL wins and finds a way to file a counter-claim and hopefully wipe the worthless hate spreading scum that is CI off the face of this beautiful planet.
haha - for a year I've hated you and now I get a chance to express it in public forum, yay!
> They should have most of the major MTA's by now. However we don't
> have a complete list of all MTA's on campus, so it is certainly
> possible that in the future some might be cut off. If that happens,
> we will find out about it after the fact. In some cases, the abuse
> staff may recognize it as an MTA, and ask them to add it to the list.
You don't have a complete list of all MTA's on campus; not really confidence inspiring. Oh, and while you're at it, can you guys *PLEASE* set your "virus filter machine" 128.6.72.254 (nbcs-av.ruthers.edu) to stop sending "virus notifications" ? Some infected bozo machine on Comcast in New Jersey was spewing Sobig.F all over the place a few days ago, and occasionally forging my email address as the "From:". Any computer-literate person (MCSE's don't count) knows that viruses forge the "From:" header. Yet your system was identifying virus-laden emails and sending me bogus "virus notifications"... until I blocked your domain to protect myself from your harassment. I have a personal domain for my own use, but I can see other people, even ISPs blocking outfits that use dumb auto-mailbombers.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
The internet would be a lot greater if you left your computer wide open so I could log in as root. Somehow I don't think you'll be contributing to the greatness of the net in that way.
Openness is a good thing, don't get me wrong, but it's what makes spam profitable in the first place (no cost to send 1 message or 1 billion). There's a middle ground here, and I do not think AOL has crossed it. Not even close.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
What if I charge some $12.99 a month to be able to send email to her grandkids, and you block her from doing that, because you have a problem with a completely unrelated business relationship of mine ?
Please show me in any contract where it states specifcially that ISP A must deliver/carry/connect with ISP B.
Please show me in your TOS of your ISP that says that they guaranteed 100% connectivity/100% email delivery of your messages to ISP YOU-name-here.
Can't find such a clause can you?
However, what I do and can find in many ISP's TOS is that they guarantee your connection, but not at 100%; nor do they guarantee that your messages will be delivered for varous unctonrollable reasons. They can't control the happenings of what a sysadmin does on a private network. As with your ISP, they can't guarantee that they will allow all messages through. Have you bothered to read your own TOS?
Aren't you kind of holding the innocent customers hostage ? I don't like Microsoft, but I still think it would be a crime to write a virus to destroy people's data just because they did chose to use Windows.
Two different animals. CIHOST knows they host spammers as evidenced through the archives on google. They've been told they have spammers; they've been told they will be blocked if they continue to host spammers; yet they DO NOTHING to stop the spam that comes from their servers. So why should the REST of the net put up with their negligence.
CI HOST has 200,000 users? What about the 5 milllion other NET users that has to deal with their crap? 200,000 users is nothing to the inconvenience they turn a blind eye to. Grandma want to contact her newphews/nieces/aunts/sisters. USe the damn phone.
Why can't you just block the spam ?
Been there doen that. Hear of Maps? Look what happened to them. Spamemrs sued them till they couldn't afford to run anymore. Want spamemrs to sue you cause you called them spamemrs even when its true?
Hey you belive them I dont. Look what happened to AGLX when they stated that they were taking care of spammers and actually weren't.
1 SBL listing is 1 too many.
You should see their spews listings.
The problem is that it's other people deciding what data comes through.
For instance, LiveJournal. Users have found that AOL is blocking HTTP requests through REFERRERs too . Nothing like having a Journal, and then putting a link to your AOL homepage (AOL Journal, etc) on your LJ profile, only to have people blocked when trying to click through (to see it in action, and you don't have referers disabled, go to fadedsanity's profile and click on the website link "p r i n c e s s". You'll get a 404. Now alter the URL (or whatever you have to do to clear the referrer) and reload the page... it works!). Sure, it's understandable to prevent image embedding (though they appear to only be doing it selectively, like with www.livejournal.com, but not ziemkowski.livejournal.com for instance), but hypertext links as well? That's just too much!
The annoying issue is that this will undoubtedly lead to hacks (or even features) to stop sending referers, which will affect website statistics, etc.
Why should the above AOL subscriber not be able to link to her own site? Because other users have marked LiveJournal.com emails as spam? So it isn't just third parties than can be upset; she should be, anybody who wants to access her site through her journal should be, and the third party (LJ) should be.
Wouldn't it have been a lot less problematic to add a custom bayesian filtering system with spam ratings, that runs on the subscriber's system? I'm sure AOL could have designed an interface and methodology for such a system that would be extremely straightforward to users yet much more effective, all without relying on one subscriber to know what another subscriber thinks of another person's messages? Heck, they could have advertised that they have "Smart" email filtering, yadda yadda yadda.
You'd think that a company that has acquired sources of programming creativity like Netscape and WinAmp, would be able to meet the interests of their subscribers and investors much better than they have with this.
How much longer until AOL blocks referers from slashdot?
Ditto for MSN
As you can see I don't care about my karma.
From a mail server list I belong to: They are the worlds biggest scum bags. They are SPAMMERS, this is FACT. A quick google is enough to convince anyone. They have been doing this for years. They have been kicked off of every network and network provider there is. Am I too assume they have some how changed their ways? Can I also safely assume that Faulkner is not running the show anymore? I openly welcome a suit from them as I have complained about them for years, and have blocked every network they host on. What CI Host is doing is trying to find a way to make money, and fast. Why? A few years back just before new years they suddenly moved their services to a new provider and created the worlds largest DNS screw up in Internet history. Some of their customers sites were not reachable for 2 weeks or more. They lost 75% of their customer base during that little event because they flat out lied about what really caused the screw up. After that happened they were hit with a huge class action (http://www.evolvedsites.com/cipetition.html). Its almost time for them to pay up on their settlement, so its either go bust or sue AOL or anyone else to find money. I spoke to Chris Faulkner a few years back, he is a dirt bag. I'm thinking of holding contest on eBay to see who will bid the highest to have that scum bag shave a "SPAMMER" on the back of his head. Those who have seen the new PingZine Web Hosting Mag will know what I am talking about. I hope AOL counter sues this dirt bag into oblivion. Back in the early days, Faulkner used to personally email the spam himself. I cannot express enough what a piece of trash this guy is. He is a liar when he says he does not spam. I have a collection of CIHOST spam dating back to 97'. I am no fan of AOL, but I have to agree with their block. We currently have the same blocks in place. For once AOL is doing something I totally agree with.
CI Host is an evil company. I can't stress that enough. How a company that operates in the manner in which they do is allowed to continue is beyond me.
Last year I had an account with HostDepartment, which was working very well for me. One day I was told by a friend that something bad had happened to my site. I looked at it and panicked, CI Host had hijacked HostDepartment's domains or something and were telling everyone that they owed them money and had gone out of business.
HostDepartment are an equally bad company too, steer clear of them. For more information, see the very first news & views article on my website.
That is quite a good round-up of the multiple issues here.
The one true judgement according to amcguinn follows:
My incoming mail provider is entitled to employ a spam-filtering system that produces false positives, (provided they are not doing it maliciously or in order to harm their competitors,) but I think it is a mistake for them to do so, and I will see it as a reason to look for a new provider.
The only reasonable argument for legal actions against AOL would be on monopoly grounds. I am personally suspicious of anti-trust legislation, but then I am a bit of a Raymondite and therefore patently insane.
Trying to force an email newsletter through the modern email system is an uphill battle that I think is doomed to failure. However careful and legitimate you are, you're going to take significant losses from spam filtering. It's going to keep on getting worse, and I can't see it ever getting better.
I advise you to plan ahead and adopt different distribution methods. Consider running an NNTP server and advising your clients to subscribe to that.
An interesting new approach would be to use a customised POP3 server that acts more like an NNTP server - i.e. all users get the same set of messages. Unlike NNTP, the server would need to keep track per-user of which messages had been seen, but unlike POP3 servers it would not need to keep copies of each message per user. The advantage of this would be that with many email clients (including Outlook?), the recipient would just need to set up your server as an additional mail account, and would get the mails from you dropped straight into their main inbox, whereas with NNTP it shows up separately. The disadvantage is that, as far as I know, no-one has yet written the server software.
In the long term, I think legitimate bulk mail has to move from a "push" system to a "pull" system, where subscription is handled entirely at the recipient end.
Why the hell won't AOL accept my innocense while blocking them!?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
I would be interested to know if your reverse DNS is working (e.g., if your IP is 1.2.3.4, then
Should either return a name or that no name is found. If no name is found, then presumably your problem is that you are not on a so-called "dynamic" block, but that your RDNS isn't working. Different codes for different issues.
an over-zealous mailbox that destroys all unwanted CD's
how long until
AOL's recent zealotry in anti-spam policy resulting in the presumption that shared-hosting providers are guilty (of spamming) unless proven innocent.
Well doesn't really matter. Innocent until proven guilty is only for the government not for indivuduals or corporations.
I expect the two litigants will need to sort out the issue of who own's AOL's network? and that depending on the outcome, things could change direction radically.
There seem to be a lot of people on /. (and on the Internet in general) who are opposed to SPAM and ready to support any cause which makes it more difficult for SPAMMers to operate. As such, they applaud AOL's efforts to keep undesirable content out of it's network.
But there also seem to be a lot of people on /. (and on the Internet in general) who support Free Speech, and are appalled when a single company (like AOL) uses the network of computers it owns to build a "gated community"; an Internet where you or I must pay to play.
These two positions are incompatible as currently conceived. Anyone who agrees with both of the above needs to do some soul searching.
If we acknowledge the right of AOL to control how it uses it's own network, then we can applaud when AOL blocks SPAM, but we cannot complain when they start blocking mailing lists, or shutting down p2p sharing, or refusing to allow their subscribers VOIP capability, or block access to web sites. We may eventually find that the only sites with any reasonable connectivity are the ones which can only be accessed through AOL.
Alternately, we could decide that AOL's network services are a type of Common Carrier network, like the airlines and the telephone system. This would mean that AOL could not prevent an AOL customer from subscribing to mailing lists, visiting web sites, or setting up their own web server. But it would also mean that SPAMMers would be guaranted a equal access to your inbox, and your neighbors worm-pool box cannot be legally blocked, so long as the worm abides by the Common Carriage rules.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
True, true. I agree with you completely, what with AOL not being a public service and all that.
I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts that they have words to that effect in their customer contract.
I'm willing to agree with you. I've never read their TOS and I hope I'm never forced to, but I think that one would be hard-pressed to find an AOL-like service that doesn't have a limitation of the company's liability, "you only see what we want you to see while we agree to show it to you" clauses, and "we can/will change this agreement at any time, but only if we feel like it" bits. However, what about the people who don't always read that stuff in its entirety, a group that could be successfully argued is in the majority?
I mean, caveat emptor and all that sort of thing, but isn't there some sort of requirement that the AOL TV spots and promo CDs that you see all over the place accurrately portray the fact that server-side spam filters are in use that prevent mail from reaching the client, and the spam filters in question yield a nonzero number of false positives? Yes, truly intelligent internet users will steer clear of AOL anyway. Yes, real men use Linux. What about my mother-in-law, who expects AOL to "bring the wide world of the inter-web right to the front door"? (I know, I still can't talk sense into her...) Isn't there a responsibility to ensure that the service you talk about in your advertising bears some passing resemblance to the service that I'll get when I give you my credit card number because I liked the "6 million dollar man" knockoff ads?
Sure, it's probably all quite legal because AOL is its own entity, not beholden to G-d or man. Sure, if you believe all that crap about speed and reliability and uptime and how it'll help you score with supermodels, it's your own stupid fault. It's probably perfectly legal, to the extent of my IANAL-level knowledge of such things...but is it ethical?
"Linux doesn't exist. Everyone knows Linux is an unlicensed version of Unix"- Kieren O'Shaughnessy
actually they have plenty of basis. Unfair competitive practices.
The only way to bust a doper--is when you yourself become a smoker!
So, is cihost.com going to sue google.com for archiving reports of their customers spam??
s .a dmin.net-abuse
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I particularly found interesting the thread from 2002 initiated by this post:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>&g t;
And on and on. Quit interesting reading in these threads. Hey, AOL, you might want to archive all of these posts on google, just to throw in cihost.com's face in front of the judge.
Blacklisting an entire ISP is essentially a secondary boycott. The anti-spam zealots should be honest about this, and differentiate their lists between primary targets (this address is a source of SPAM) and secondary ones (this ISP supports SPAM).
But more importantly, a secondary boycott is of no use unless you let consumers use the information. Generally, the only way you find out that someone thinks your ISP is a spam-collaborator is when some email that you sent fails to get there and you actually find out about it.
Silently discarding emails from a secondary blacklist is a very stupid idea. It defeats the entire purpose, but that's exactly how most servers are configured to use blacklists.
You also need to have clear standards that an ISP can follow. Some of those that I have seen are absurd. SPEWS, for example, will blacklist an ISP even if their mail server never sends a single piece of bulk email. All that is required is that they host a spam related web-site.
So the reasonable standard proposed here seems to be that ISPs are responsible for conducting background checks on everyone that they set up a web-site for, and routinely monitoring the content of every page.
So much for $7.95/month web sites.
You might argue that they should remove such sites once they are identified. But you have a very tricky problem if you expect hosters to remove content that is not per se violating the law.
You can't expect ISPs to respond to anti-spam complaints with one set of rules and then use a different set of rules when the RIAA complains.
What is reasonable is for ISPs to limit the outbound email capacity for accounts that they have not verified an actual address for. This should not be a problem for a legitimate commercial account. And people setting up economy accounts have no need to send 1000s of pieces a mail with forged headers every day.
ISPs should be expected to control use of their networks for outbound SMTP. All abusive email must be traceable back to a legal address. Forged headers originating on the network should result in immediate account termination, perhaps with an automatic penalty.
But it is not reaonsable to expect ISPs to shut down the supporting web-sites. They can't do that without blocking the ability of legitimate small business and hobbyists to easily and quickly set up their own sites.
And, yes, you get what you pay for, it's supply and demand. Rackspace is cheaper because less customers want to go with a supplier that's blacklisted everywhere.
Lately though we are worried about blacklisting of our rackspace IP's due to the crazy way some of these blacklists operate.
Oh, don't worry about that.There are plenty of crazy blacklists that only block parts of Rackspace, but the bugs are being worked out and soon Rackspace will be entirely blocked.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
AOL bounding the messages from my home SMTP server because it is on a cable modem IP even though it is locked down.
Does anyone know how to set up exim so that if I am sending to AOL, that it will route via my ISPs SMTP server? I don't want all my SMTP traffic to go via the ISP's server, just that which has aol as a destination?
Even just a link to a good exim manual that his this would be nice.
-no broken link
Have your mail server relay all its outgoing mail through your ISP's mail server. Inbound mail should still make it to you in one piece.
Visit the
And who is AOL competing with that this is unfair to? If anything, this is *damaging* AOLs business, since people will be unsatisfied with their service (due to undelivered emails) and leave.
if you ask me, AOL is the leading spammer of all the earth. im sure others would agree.
You don't think AOL has crossed the middle ground by blocking out ENTIRE DOMAINS? Not just CI Host, but the SBC DSL in California, or whatever it's called, has also been blocked. What's next requiring a license to run an smtp server?
I don't mean to use the slippery slope argument though; blocking entire domains is bad enough.
Several months ago AOL blocked the list server I admin from sending to them. We cant seem to get them to unblock it even though it is not an open relay. Most likely one of their customers reported us as UBE because they couldnt figure out how to unsubscribe.
No big loss for us, the people who really cared about staying on our lists changed ISP's after their complaints to AOL went unheard.
Guess what? It's unsatisfactory. Nice reasons, too:
- failure to resolve complaints
- failure to address cause of complaints
- billing disputes
- failure to provide timely refunds
- failure to provide promised services
- lying on their website by stating they are members of the Better Business Bureau and participants in the BBB On-Line Reliability Program
See for yourself: BBB Reliability ReportPortable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
I am not sure of the validity of the suit brought by CI Host. I would say their overall reputation leaves some question. I can say that without a doubt the logic that AOL uses in parsing email headers is seriously flawed at best. I had major problems with AOL adding my company's server to their internal RBL for seemingly no reason (we have an aggressive AUP which is diligently enforced). After multiple phone calls to their abuse desk I finally found the cause. When parsing email headers the software they use to automatically add IPs to the RBL looks at only the MTA that passed the message to their system. In our case we host user mailboxes. Some of these users elect to forward their mail to their AOL account. When their user clicks on the "spam" button in the AOL interface our server is targeted as the source of the spam. When I pointed out to the abuse desk person that this is a rather serious flaw in their logic they agreed and promised to follow up with me. Of course they never did follow up. The problem is that they try to over automate the process and rely on this parsing as law. The people that wrote their parsing rules have incorporated bad logic, so this over confidence causes problems. By virtue of forwarding mail to an AOL account at the request of their own users, their system believes we are spammers. /shrug
But that's rather moot, I'm not talking about SPEWS, or even blocklists. Everyone everywhere is blocking Rackspace, personally. Some are slowly blocking it piecemeal, some just dropped the whole thing in, and some started off blocking it piecemeal but at this point in time have managed to piecemeal block the whole thing, like me.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
if that domain is notorious for spam, then I would do the same thing AOL did. again, sue the spammers for lost profits.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
Maybe you would do it. I'm not disagreeing. I'm just saying it's bad for the internet. This is almost as bad as cable ISPs blocking out video streams for more than 10 minutes.
...own this company?
But as Spamcop's fans point out, it's better than nothing. And the sustained DoS attacks that Spamcop has suffered in recent months tend to indicate that it's effective enough to really piss off some spammers.
... this time, I'm on their side. Is there even one person who likes getting spammed? Spam mail is not a good thing, especially when you consider the load on mail servers.
I'm glad that AOL is taking this stand, it's about damn time that a company has stood up against mass spammers. I can't stand AOL, true, but they're standing on the good side this time. If you don't like AOL's anti-spam policies, go get an account on Yahoo or Hotmail.
If AOL wants to refuse a spammer access to their mail servers and users, then they have that right. It is my line of thinking that a spammer does NOT have the right to clog another company's mail server(s). E-Mail is not a right when you are using someone else's servers.
I wish mail servers could be setup to reverse spam someone. A mail server gets one message from a spammer and then it sends it back a few thousand times. That would be great.
Seth Anderson BTW, I'm not 23 anymore -- I am TexasCowboy26 now. =)
AOL blocks the entire cable modem address space that I'm attached to, so I can't send any mail from my home server. It just disappears. The cablemodem company (Comcast, formerely ATTBI)also provides free connections to many of the local schools, and they can't send mail to people on AOL.
I try to get around AOL's black list by routing mail through my ISP's servers like ordinary customers do, but that still doesn't get mail through reliably!
I agree with the poster who pointed out that AOL is doing this more to reduce the load on their servers than reduce the spam their customers receive. The customer doesn't seem to have any way to introduce exceptions to AOL's black hole policy.
It's kind of hard to explain to get GrandPa to believe that AOL doesn't accept a lot of mail because he gets so much other mail (mostly from other old people on AOL).
I really think AOL is abusing it's market power here.