AOL Blocking Emails Critical Of The Company?
from the convenient-filtering dept
There's been some recent controversy about AOL's plan to charge senders of marketing emails for a guarantee that they would not get flagged by spam filters. Now the EFF, which has been arguing against the policy, is claiming that AOL is blocking emails from opponents of the plan. Hundreds of people who forwarded a letter to AOL users, with a link to the site DearAol.com, had the emails bounced back to them. AOL claims that a software glitch was affecting emails with that URL among others, and that it is now fixed. Obviously, at this point it's a matter of whether to take AOL at its word -- something many will be hesitant to do. The fact that they are charging companies to bypass spam filters gives them an incentive to reject unpaid emails as much as possible. If it was an honest glitch, how much longer would it have taken to discover it, had it not been associated with a high-profile organization? If it's not, it's pretty embarrassing, and feeds right into the original complaints against the company.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Bug in anti-phishing code?
But they ended up blocking all emails with links containing "aol.co", including "dearaol.com".
There but for the grace of God etc.. No matter how many tests you do, with an operation like AOL, as soon as code goes live it likely gets more stress in the first five minutes than all their test cases.
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aol
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Technical Background
http://www.politechbot.com/2006/04/15/debate-over-dearaolcom/
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Re: Technical Background
See the snide comments in the original article about AOL's software glitch.
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Re: Re: Technical Background
Hey giafly,
Sorry about that.
For the sake of making long words wrap properly, we put a space in especially long words. Otherwise, people end up making the page look screwed up.
If you actually link to the URL, this doesn't happen.
I note in the first post you thought we block as spam any message with a URL. That's not true. The spam filter may catch it (it works on a number of factors), but we're pretty quick at letting such messages through. We check the filter regularly.
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