Ok, so I'm exaggerating...but they did really piss me off.

I've been getting spam quite frequently from ETJ@aol.com and finally getting sick of it I figured I would send a complaint and copy of the mails to abuse@aol.com.

Few moments later I get this:
Following the link I find this:
Does anyone else find this repugnant, braindead, and ass-backwards? AOL are basically giving free reign for their lusers to spam whomever they want...and removing victims recourse to complain about it. I had to forward the complaint to my gmail address to send it to them (after appending a spiteful diatribe directed at AOL's policy makers...)

Can someone tell me how much less 'difficult' it is to track down some nigerian spammer who uses a4sddyhsgg@yahoo.com than 'me' who's 'real' IP address they could quickly run a whois on to find my contact info?

Guilty until proven innocent by the court of AOL

No, when you FINALLY get sick of it, you'll put a filter rule on your email client to trash mails from that address.

Spammers are not even worth the effort it takes to ignore them, let alone what you're putting yourself through.

Sure. then I can spend 5 hours a day creating filters for all the email addresses. Dealing with spam is not really the point of my rant anyway...the point is AOL enacting blanket bans on innocent IP addresses.

I TOTALLY AGREE...

I believe it's no form of protection to ban an entire list of IP's. It's limiting their customers if anything. For example:
A company that a family member of mine works for denies these dynamic/residential IP's. This company relies on email interaction with their customers as a form of support and to discuss product. For those customers who's addresses are denied, they have to explicitly add them to their AddressBook to override the software in place to stop the spam from this set of IP's, what a pain!

How about use something decent, like SpamAssassin to 'mark' your customers email as possible Spam and allow them to decide what to do with it (similar to Yahoo's Spam filter).

Anyway..

Down with AOL!

Cool

Bulliver man, you're using AOL. Seriously, find a proper ISP - they have your money and now they don't want to know about you.

Alternatively, get onto the proper tech chat (the one to one with an AOL techie) and ask for their advice - the AOL UK guys were great a few years ago (when I was an AOL person) and were able to fix many problems.....including cancelling my account.

I think you misread my rant XavierP, I most certainly do _not_ use AOL. I sent an email to abuse@aol.com to report spam originating from one of their customers and it was blocked because I run a mail server from a dynamic/residential IP address...

AOL used to ban all email from the whole of the ISP I'm with (claranet), sometimes AOL just plain sucks

Go to yahoo and sign up for a free account and send them an email from there, it will get thru most likely, I doubt they'd be blocking the 20 million plus accounts yahoo has..

Or use msn, hotmail... etc.. hell, want a gmail account, I have many invites?

Trickykid: That's what I did:
Did anyone actually read what I wrote?

I think we just couldn't get past the AOL bit. I know I couldn't.

It's a pain really, if the abuse @ AOL won't help, have you tried the abuse@ your own provider? I'm sure they won't appreciate having their servers spammed.

Umm.. not really. Got bored halfway thru..

And I don't blame ISP's for blocking DHCP server assigned home brewed mail servers.. That's where probably more than half the spammers spam from, also using the improperly setup newbie machines to relay the email, with the dumbarse running an open relay with no clue serving the world spam..

I run my own webserver on a cable modem with DHCP and I just learn not to email to such addresses or just don't care, especially with AOL email accounts..

Well I gotta admire your honesty...

I'm just so disillusioned with AOL, I mean, who thought a huge corporation would screw a little guy? I think I will sell my computers and enjoy a quiet life of solitude in the woods. :P

That was meant ironically, yeah?

AOL's responses appear to me to be perfectly rational for a huge company:
problem
not a customer
we have enough work to do with our paying customers
ignore

Your best bet is to go through your own ISP, ISP's tend to listen more to each other than to the customers.

Yeah, it was meant ironically...

I don't know why this bugs me so much..it doesn't seem to bug anyone else (except Master C..)
I really don't think a blanket ban is any sort of solution, rather I think it is extreme laziness on the part of the AOL sysadmins. It is an quick fix to a difficult problem, and one that ends up punishing their paying customers.

What if my granny had an AOL account, sorry gran, can't send you an email 'cos AOL thinks I'm a spammer. She wouldn't even know that I sent her something that was blocked. Does Granny have the ability to tell AOL that mail from my domain is legitimate, and should be accepted?

On _my_ mail server, should I just block all @gmail @hotmail and @yahoo accounts? Because you know, I've gotten spam from them before. Lots of spam comes from China, should I block the entire .cn domain space? Hell no, because even if it blocked 1000 spam emails per 1 legitimate mail, I would never get the legitimate mail...and that just isn't acceptable. What if a run a business site from my server...sorry potential customers who use AOL, I can't respond to your questions. This hurts me, and AOL customers.

Anyway...the whole point of this entire stupid post was to point out the irony of having my mail blocked from AOL when I was simply trying to report spam from one of their users. I could send truckloads of spam from an untraceable yahoo account to AOL, but sending from my ip address, which is easily traced to me through my ISP, and even a simple whois is no good because "it is difficult to determine who is responsible for mail being generated from these IPs"

The whole thing is stupid anyway...if a real spammer finds their mail being blocked by AOL, then they will just find a zombie windows server running from a static IP and spoof that IP address. The spam will still get through, and all that gets accomplished is innocent people getting screwed...

i dont think they are lazy. they probably have very important things to do than to worry about the problems that can arise from not doing this.

it makes sense, if oyu are sending a legitimate email, you will try another address. if you know how to set up your own mail server, you will probably know what the problem is and can solve it. but if you are just sending out mass spam, you will not jump through hoops to try and get it to AOL.

noone is getting screwed, its not like they compeletly blocked you from sending them an email.

i still think its kinda stupid because they will still get spammed to death anyway, but there is no need to lose any sleep over it.