CircleID

Try reading the full article Suresh, instead of scanning the first few lines and firing off a kneejerk response.

Oh I read it all right.  And I've been having a fairly longish conversation with Danny on politech about it.  Check www.politechbot.com for that lot.

The problem is it seems you trust AOL to use it in the beneficial way you think and hope they will. Corporations like AOL say all the time, "Trust Us" it will benefit you. We are doing it for your own good. Unfortunately it doesn't turn out that way most of the time.

AOL has more in mind than just making sure your email gets through to customers that have asked for your email.

What keeps a spammer or even a phisher from setting up a front company and paying the fee?

I know the people who implement AOL's antispam policy

I have also seen more than 5 years worth of similar propaganda on the spam issue from the EFF

For the answer to that question - poke around circleid for older articles by me, John Levine etc on goodmail, all in the "addressing spam" section.

It is so refreshing to hear points of view on the AOL/Goodmail issues from people in the trenches-- engineers actualy setting up, maintaining, and operating large scale e-mail systems. All to often this "debate" is dominated by chicken littles, who have yet to reveal a single ACTUAL case of damage from the falling sky.

The MoveON.org rants were even worse, claiming cancer patients would not get notices of life saving drugs!

I've not got a very good opinion of moveon.org or their emailing policies .. but well, that bit about "cancer patients" is rather stupider than their usual stuff.

This dearaol campaign is starting to fizzle out - so I guess they'll grow a lot more hysterical before they finally pipe down.

I can't comment on the DearAOL compaign or the EFF's position on it generally because I haven't looked into it, but I can confidently say that current spam filtering technologies seem to be growing increasingly more "dangerous" to safe mail.

I've recently have had problems with Verizon blocking "email address" confirmation emails from digg.com and the OpenNIC mailing list.

I've also had problems with AOL repeatably blocking emails from a XML.org mailing list because it didn't like some of the URLs in the email. And I deliberately have my AOL spam filtering turned off! And they still do it. And AOL doesn't have any means of setting up "whitelists" either, so I can't clear emails coming from a particular address.

In neither case did the offending emails show up in my spam folder. They were all automatically deleted from the system, and no matter what I did I couldn't get them back.

I haven't even been able to resolve either problem successfully. Verizon tech support pointed me to a page where I could flag the sender as not-spam, but I haven't heard anything from them one way or the other, so I don't know if I can recieve emails from digg.com now or not.

I will be the first man to say that bad and even grossly incompetent spam filtering exists.  That shouldnt give EFF the excuse to beat up on all spam filtering in general.

regards
-srs

ps - I've found AOL quite responsive to concerns about valid email being lost - there's a number you can call, and a detailed note on their blocking critieria, at http://postmaster.info.aol.com

I note with some schadenfreude that dearaol.com is dead in the water.
And AOL is still using goodmail. And Granny still isn't paying to send email.

The last post on that blog (5/9/06) signed off with:
> AOL's silence in rolling out their pay-to-send system is deafening

I can't exactly say that dearaol's demise was all that deafening but then ..

This is the way the astroturfing ends,
This is the way the astroturfing ends,
Not with a bang but with a whimper.

srs (with apologies to T.S.Eliot)

What prompted me to write this? Well, John Gilmore seems to have suddenly decided that e360insight was right to sue spamhaus.
http://blogs.securiteam.com/index.php/archives/664
Oh, he also adds that Spamhaus and Paul Vixie are "dishonest" and "blackmail people into joining the conspiracy" by "deliberately blocking more people than the spammers"

The EFF still hasn't got off trying to parrot the "blackmail" meme (their favorite, right after the "McCarthy blacklisting" one) when talking about spam filtering, I see.

Oh well, I'm sure someone in there has a copy of "Propaganda 101, Goebbels and Rove" handy.