If you haven’t already heard, Danny O’Brien of the EFF and founder of the DearAOL.com coalition discovered today that AOL was blocking all incoming mail that mentioned the “DearAOL.com” domain name. DearAOL.com, remember, is the Web site set up to oppose AOL’s plan to let senders bypass their mail filters and get a certification label for 1/4-penny per message. In the article, an AOL spokesman said that the blocking of mail mentioning DearAOL.com was a “glitch” that was fixed.

Actually, for at least a few years now, AOL has had a “blacklist” of URLs such that any mail message to an AOL member that mentions one of those URLs gets returned to the sender. In one well-publicized case, it happened in 2003 to a MoveOn.org site, BushIn30Seconds.org. The bounce message that comes back says “The URL contained in your email to AOL members has generated a high volume of complaints.”

I had actually been doing a study, off and on for the past few weeks, on AOL’s filtering of mail containing certain URLs, doing tests by setting up my own AOL account and sending URLs to it to see which ones were blocked. Personally the whole idea of blocking mail containing certain URLs is disturbing to me; it doesn’t harm real spammers, who can just move to a new domain, and people can file phony complaints against political enemies to get them blocked (which is apparently what happened with BushIn30Seconds.org).

I was planning to finish up the study soon and give it as an exclusive to a reporter who could verify the findings (so they get their exclusive, and in return I get to see the story say that “XYZ news service has confirmed that these URLs are blocked” instead of “Some Internet activist claims that these URLs are blocked”). However, with the DearAOL.com issue breaking in the news today, apparently AOL has turned off all filtering of mail mentioning certain URLs, since all the URLs that I had found to be blocked, are now getting through to AOL e-mail addresses with no problem. So that study is up in the air now.

But anyway, when I was testing it, I found that of the 41 GeoCities neighborhoods (like http://www.geocities.com/Area51, back in the days when GeoCities users got grouped into neighborhoods rather than getting their own top-level directory), 22 were blocked and 19 were not. (That is, any e-mail to an AOL user that mentioned any one of the 22 “blocked” neighborhoods, would get bounced back to the sender.) I doubt very much that there was a groundswell of complaints from AOL users about spam advertising the top-level directories of those 22 neighborhoods! It looked like just another arbitrary “glitch.”

So when AOL claims that mail from people who haven’t paid the Goodmail “e-mail tax” will continue to be delivered normally, forgive us for being less than totally reassured.

[Bennett Haselton of Peacefire.org]

[tags]email tax,peacefire.org,dearaol.com,aol block,geocities,goodmail,e-mail tax[/tags]