My Isp Has Responded About Spam Mail...

[UKMan]

telia.com - my ISP - has sent out emails to its subscribers stating that (roughly translated) they have stopped all forwarding of email to AOL.

As i dont have any friends or contacts within the AOL domain, i cannot verify this. From what i understand this only applys to people who host their own email servers (companys etc) in a bid to stop unsolicited spreading of spam mail from said companies.

Does anyone have any info on why just AOL has been targeted? I think that AOL has been complaining about the large amount of spam from the Nordic countries, but cannot confirm this.

Also, a few months ago, my ISP also stopped all access to the alt.binaries newsgroups - in a bid to stop the spread of CP. A very good move of course, but causing grief to those who used those newsgroups for legal and clean activities. Maybe a few other ISP's should consider the same move. It wont stop the problem but it does make the spread of this stuff more difficult.

Just a bit of info

Peace
UKMan

[nikita69]

From my experience as an ex-AOL customer and beta tester, AOL practices toward spam blocking has not been even close to the basics such topic. They didn't even maintain a list of KNOWN spam ISP's customers, until this year when enough customer cancelled service. Today, from a friend of mine who works in Mexico as a programmer, tells me that the spam blocking is one of many issues AOL has and all started since the Hackers of Mozilla were fired/released/quit.

I read an article about AOL's customers' responses to spam email (unofficial), yet I could be mistaken about the numbers, on an average every aol customer gets around 50 emails a day.

I have 2 accounts, one is hotmail (free) and the other is msn (also free thru my .net subscription and the same as an MSN customer). I haven't seen any spam email in months. maybe one or two slip by every month, i just inform them and never see it again. whatever tactics or tools MSN is using, in my opinion they are by far better than AOL.

[UKMan]

50 a day is a lot and dosnt reflect too kindly on AOL. My own ISP (telia.com - Sweden) has introduced an anti-spam filter that has cut down drastically on the amount of spam i get. I used to recieve about 10 a day, but now its down to around 2 or 3 - which i can handle by using MailWasher.

The problem seems to be that spammers are using yahoo accounts or similar and those cant be filtered out i guess as you cant stop the whole yahoo.com domain. But using this mailwasher programme does at least give me a hint of whats waiting for me before i download it.

I just cant understand why AOL would want to block the whole telia.com domain though. Even though its only from corporate servers, there must be thousands of legitimate email that cant be sent anymore to AOL customers from Sweden. Maybe i have read it wrong - but i dont think so.

Anyways, thx for the input - maybe someone else will also have some input here

Peace
UKMan

[nikita69]

I doubt many will see this post, since it relates more to SOFTWARE. suggest to PM a mod to move it there for more responses.

[UKMan]

Thats not really necessary, i'm not that interested in knowing why telia and AOL are having issues - i just thought someone out there might have an idea whats going on. But it does seem that the bigger ISP's are starting to wake up - which is good news.

Peace
UKMan

[MagicNakor]

Unless someone happens to have contacts with AOL, which is probably not that uncommon.

I'll bet your ISP gets a number of complaints about that one.

[DL.]

My Email provider has blocked aol, yahoo, and hotmail for some time. I don't mind at all now although it meant updating some of my contact lists. The results are well worth it. Business is business again.

[UKMan]

Originally posted by MagicNakor@7 November 2003 - 07:57
Unless someone happens to have contacts with AOL, which is probably not that uncommon.

I'll bet your ISP gets a number of complaints about that one.

Im sure they do as a lot of Swedish companys obviously have contacts with AOL customers - otherwise why the block?.

Last year i was sending email to one of my daughters in UK - none of them where getting through and i knew nothing about it. Untill my daughter sent me letters wondering why i never answered her emails. Then it turned out that AOL (which my daughter was using at the time) was blocking email from Sweden, but not to Sweden! Now its the other way around - my ISP is blocking outbound to AOL - wierd

DL.
How did you get in touch with those on your contact-list if you couldnt email them? Must have been difficult.

[DL.]

They contacted me through my website guestbook(sometime these things are usefull) and I then posted solutions in the site news. Not the best solution for everyone but a bit of common sense will always provide a way around these problems.