America Online’s latest battle in the spam wars has sparked criticism
from online groups who say its policy of blocking e-mail from
dynamically-assigned IP addresses is creating too much collateral damage
with legitimate e-mail relay users.
Online discussion sites such as slashdot.org have been piling up postings
lately over AOL’s recent move to block residential broadband users on
AT&T/Comcast’s system from using public relay mail channels in order to reach
AOL members with e-mail.
AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said the effort, which began in late March,
has helped it reduce its spam complaints in some instances by 90 percent.
“We have been working cooperatively, with a range of broadband providers to
mutually identify dynamic IP addresses of their customers not using proper
e-mail relays to send AOL members e-mails,” he told internetnews.com.
“Our job has been to be guided by our members (who complain about the
spam) and go after the spammers using e-mail relay servers as their command
and control centers.”
But as a result, complain critics, residential and especially small
businesses that use residential broadband accounts to send e-mails with
different addresses than that of their ISPs are blocked out too.
The issue is increasingly pitting commercial ISP providers’ anti-spam
efforts against online groups who bridle at the notion of large,
commercial ISPs taking unilaterial measures to block who can send mail and
who can’t.
It goes against the codes of conduct about e-mail and networking, said
Karsten Self, who demonstrated the blocked header he received when he tried to e-mail an AOL
member from his DSL connection.
“AOL is violating a standard of people sending large quantities of mail,”
said Self, who is active in the free software movement.
He said AOL needs to create more effective filters for the problem,
rather than block groups of e-mail senders who use relay channels to send
bulk mail.
“It’s like they’re saying ‘we don’t want to deal with your kind,'” said
Self, who describes himself as active in the free software movement.
“How much further down this path of large ISPs slicing out the ‘unwanted’
… before all ISPs will simply stop passing packets past their own networks
which do not originate from their servers or a ‘registered business partner’
of some sort,” said another post to a Linux discussion list where the slashdot.org thread originated.
“I think we are on a long slow decline of SMTP
another.
Graham said since the program was implemented in late March, AOL has been
able to block 90 percent of spam. Now, he
said AOL is working with Baby Bell and DSL provider SBC to
implement the blocking program on its network as well as other ISPs such as
ATTbi.
Graham said individuals who are blocked will get a note about what’s happening, telling them they should
contact their ISP broadband providers to make appropriate adjustments on
their ranges when sending out the e-mails.
“We have worked it out with individuals that may be inadvertently
affected,” he said. “As long as the broadband users are using normal
channels of mail relays of operators, they should have no problem sending
e-mail to AOL members,” said Graham.
“We have made it clear that we don’t accept connections from broadband
residential dynamic IP addresses that we have identified as engines of
spam.”
