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You've Got Spam: AOL Blocks 1/2 Trillion Spam
yohaas writes "Yahoo! News is reporting that AOL blocked more than 500 billion spam messages for its users in 2003. That comes to 40 messages a day per user. The company regularly blocks 75-80% of all incoming mail as spam! The article also lists the top 10 spam phrases for the year, including such come-ons as: 'Viagra online', 'Online pharmacy', 'Get out of debt' and 'Get bigger'."
They bounce back ALL mail to addresses that don't exist, and if some spammer users YOUR domain or YOUR email address, you get all the bounces. They also don't respond when you try to get them to stop. It's incredibly frustrating.
I'm not sure if it has to do with the new United States anti-spam law or not, but I have received the same amount of spam in 48 hours as I would have in 12 hours in 2003. About 45 emails.
I go to purdue universtiy in lafayette and when I try to email anyone with an AOL address, I get a return message saying that @purdue.edu has been blocked for spam. Its easy to reach 500 billion when you block out entire organizations and probably count all the legit email as spam. Their is no way a universities email server was used for spam, if a student sent spam their is no way they would be caught. This suggests aol makes no complaints with providers and just blocks automatically. Very bad. Whats the point in blocking spam if you don't report it to the ISP so that the spammer can go down for it.
So why the hell do they get to advertise in a public company for FREE?
Um, how did you get the idea AOL was getting to advertise "for FREE"? The United States Postal Service is being paid by AOL for every person who signs up with a disc distributed by the post office. In theory, it means that postal rates won't go up as often or as much.
I know that was a joke (and a decent one, at that), but I must point out that there's a significant difference between AOL paying their money to mail you a nigh-infinite quantity of CD's and some a-hole spammer making you and AOL both pay to process and read their Viagra spam.
And to give AOL a little credit, even they are making fun of all the CD's they mail out in their most recent TV ads.
Though it makes my head hurt to see Jerry Stiller and Snoop Dogg in a commercial together. That's just wrong on so many diffferent levels...
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
No, the regulations are non-existent, and not just overseas, either. Regulations - in the sense of laws, that is - are nearly non-existent in the USA, Canada, and Europe as well. Spammers spam with near-impunity in all those places. The worst thing that can happen - unless they have the bad luck of being in a state that has a spam law with teeth and an attorney general to match - is they get their service disconnected. In a day or two or three, they've bought another connection somewhere else.
/21 bought from some other upstream, and after some digging it became obvious that this entire network provider was nothing but a front for providing bandwidth to spammers.
I used to work for a large, well-known hosting company whose name is taken from a book of the Bible. They didn't have to many spammers or pr0n sites in their space when things were booming, but now they're among the worst for hosting spammers.
There are network providers all over the country that are as bad or worse. I recently ran across one that had a
A lot of spam is sent through China by contract with network providers there, and through South Korea because it's the open proxy capitol of the world, and there is a very large and well organized spam ring operating in eastern Europe as well, and it seems soundly connected to US spammers. The spam business has gone international in a big way.
In none of those places, including the US and Canada, generally, is spam illegal, so it's never necessary to bribe any government official into looking the other way. It's just easier to pay off the ISP to look the other way in some countries, but again, that's pretty easy in a lot of places in North America too. When the economy goes down, pink contracts go up. Many companies and individuals will do just about anything to survive, and network providers are certainly no exception. For every one that will cut a spammer's connection as soon as they notice, there's another that will happily sell the spammer as much bandwidth and IP space as he wants. Then they pass that space on to some other unsuspecting customer, who finds that she can't send mail to a lot of places because that netblock is in every RBL - good, bad, or ugly - in the world.
As much as we rightly despise spammers, those who sheeld them and knowingly sell them bandwidth and colo space are just as bad.
At San Jose State your port would be automatically shut down by the management software in a few minutes. Same thing would happen if you started pinging, port scanning, or were infected with a virus. You really have to have systems like this in place in a large university environment.
Tim Smith - Ramblings from Nerd Land
Now, if only they could do something about the pop-ups, crashes, dropped connections, high prices, incessant self-promotion, etc, they might have a good product.
One time, when my usual ISP was down, I needed internet. Desparate, (back when I ran Winders) I threw on an AOL CD to use some of the 1045 hours of free access, planning to cancel when my regular ISP was back online. Cancelling AOL is interesting, first off, the person who answers the calls has been brainwashed to think AOL is the greatest THING ever, and will first ask you why you want to cancel, then argue with your reasoning. Once you go through all that, they will offer you two free months of service while you reconsider. DON'T FALL FOR THIS. I did, and forgot, and the bastards charged my credit card three months later. I was mad as hell and had to go through the Movementarian "You're free to leave anytime you want, but tell us why you're leaving" grilling on the phone all over again. Of course, they offered me two free months again, so apparently you can stay on AOL for free indefinitely this way (But why would you want to?).
Kaolin may be the only English word with "aol" as a substring.
Unknown host pong.