AOL charged with blocking opponents' e-mail

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AOL has been blocking email for some time. Most people believe that AOL only blocks email if they accept AOL's spam filters. People who cannot afford to miss professional email under any circumstances turn off email-blocking and assume they will get anything sent to, business, personal, or spam.

Not true. AOL maintains a black-list/white-list filter that is applied to all incoming email, regardless of the addressee's preferences. My wife and I each learned this with our individual accounts.

She edits three national publications and uses her AOL address as one contact point for some of her writers. She began getting a few calls from various writers and colleagues asking her why she hadn't written back. The reason, of course, was that she hadn't received their email nor had the email been bounced back to all the original senders (some had, some hadn't).

I found this out when communicating with some international software authors and found that I wasn't getting their correspondence -- it took a query email from me and they hadn't to borrow a friend's email address to get back to me.

When I challenged AOL about this policy, I was informed (in the usual "I didn't make this policy -- it comes from above" manner of middle-level executives) that AOL does reserve the right to determine what ISP's and individuals to block. I was told that I could request that individual users be moved to their "White List" and that ISP-owners could request that their return addresses be added also.

As far as I am concerned, this verges on the illegal.

But, only verges.

So far, too few Americans take email seriously enough for the government to intervene. But it won't be long before we begin having email regulations equivalent to postal regulations -- in other words, uncensored delivery of email will be considered a matter of law.

This might happen sooner if more people began protesting.

Yes, spam is a problem; but so is junk snail-mail. I want the right ot make my own decisions about what gets blocked, how it gets blocked, and if anything gets blocked.

As for now, my choice is nothing. Let me do my own filtering, with my own software, and don't make decisions about what I want to get and what I don't.

Posted by: mijcar   Posted on: 04/17/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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