AOL pulls back on email ban
p2p news / p2pnet: Shortly after the EFF posted an info-item on the fact AOL was blocking all emails with links to www.DearAOL.com, AOL hastily took the barriers down.
Last Thursday more than over 100 people who’d signed a petition to AOL also tried sending messages to AOL-using friends. But they each received a bounce-back message telling them their emails had, “failed permanently.”
“The fact is, ISPs like AOL commonly make these kinds of arbitrary decisions – silently banning huge swathes of legitimate mail on the flimsiest of reasons – every day, and no one hears about it,” said EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) activism coordinator Danny O’Brien.
“AOL’s planned CertifiedEmail system would let them profit from this power by offering to charge legitimate mailers to bypass these malfunctioning filters.”
The DearAOL.com Coalition represents over 15 million people combined – and has grown from 50 member organizations to 600 in a month, says the EFF.
“Since the beginning of the DearAOL.com campaign, more than 350,000 Internet users have signed letters to AOL opposing its pay to send proposal.”
If you’re in, or will be, around San Francisco on April 20, O’Brien and tech expert Esther Dyson will face off over the question, “Email – Should the Sender Pay?”
Mitch Kapor, one of the EFF’s original founders, will moderate.
Also See:
EFF – EFF Debate: “Email – Should the Sender Pay?”, April 17, 2006
April 17th, 2006 at 9:43 pm
i dont understand the advantage of having an AOL email address these days.
if everyone with AOL email accounts migrated to gmail or other free accounts then AOL would soon reconsider their options. people being what they are will rather stay with AOL and stick it out. pointless really.
just let your ISP give you internet access and shop around for the other stuff like email. thats what i call simplified.
April 18th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
First off, AOL is a really weak ISP. They work to control your surfing purely for their own advantage, play free and easy with the way they charge you for service and support, and arbitrarily filter content and access. It’s ok to be on AOL as a new internet user but after six months – you should know better.
And second; you should know that if you use the email service from your ISP (specifically, if you use an email address from your ISP’s domain, i.e. sillybunt@aol.com) you can expect them to hold your email hostage during any dispute. The longer you use their email the tougher time you’ll have leaving them. So don’t do it. Either use an independent email service (gmail, hotmail, whatever) or just get your own portable domain name.