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Spam America Online

AOL Blocks 2 Billion Spam/Day 108

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-thats-just-flat-out-scary dept.
T_moz writes "According to this article AOL has blocked over two billion (2000000000) SPAM emails in one day!" This figure is 70-80% of all mail incoming to AOL users. Utterly insane. Unfortunately, all this blocking means spammers will just send more mail to make up for it until a real solution is found.
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AOL Blocks 2 Billion Spam/Day More

AOL Blocks 2 Billion Spam/Day

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  • About 80% of all my incoming mail is spam.
    And why aren't there any comments on this story?

    • Re:That sounds about right.... (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      About 80% of all my incoming mail is spam.
      And why aren't there any comments on this story?

      80% of them have been blocked...
    • While I'm sure this has been done long before I came up with it, i'm going to still tell my story.. When I first got to college a little under 3 years ago I started getting hit with spam. So, I wrote a script that sent a challenge/response email to the user who sent me mail. All of my friends/family/ebay bidders responded, never a spammer. My name is dknj, I've been spam free for 3 years.

      -dk
    • But, I somehow still have 50+ junk emails in my box everyday. The damned AOL software dosen't let you report spam with more than one email selected. So, to report that spam, I'd have to go through 50 cycles of clicking the spam, clocking the report spam button, and then following the dialog that follows. How's that for convience?

  • SPAM (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    2bn! wow - if, they only had a dollar for each one blocked, they would almost be profitable again.

  • no wonder (Score:4, Funny)

    by DanIncognito ( 112160 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @02:19PM (#5855281)
    No wonder I can't get any help with my nigerian bank account problems!
  • I know I've tried to send several LEGIT mails off my linux server hosted on comcast's network and have bounced every time.

    Fuckers.
    • Oh, suck it up and make the one-line change to
      route your email through one of your ISP's mail-gateways. That is what they are there for.
    • 1.9B? You mean you've tried to send 100 million messages to AOL? No wonder they blocked you - you're a spammer!
    • i know the feeling

      550-The IP address you are using to connect to AOL is either open to
      550-the free relaying of e-mail, is serving as an open proxy, or is a
      550-dynamic (residential) IP address. AOL cannot accept further e-mail
      550-transactions from your server until either your server is closed to
      550-free relaying/proxy, or your ISP removes your IP address from their
      550-list of dynamic IP addresses. For additional information,
      550-please visit http://postmaster.info.aol.com.
      550 Goodbye

      And yes I just added
      • If you had to deal with the spam problem for a living like I do you would understand aohell's view on this. If you try to send mail to our servers you get the same reply basically. Spammers have screwed up the world of email, but so have people setting up their own mail servers and leaving them open for the spammers to use. Why not use comcast's mail system? Our mail server will not accept anything from an address unless it has a MX record. I suggest if you want to run your own mail pay the money get

  • :D (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 01, 2003 @02:22PM (#5855316)
    Wow, the filters are sooo good they blocked all the comments to this story.

  • Want a solution? (Score:5, Funny)

    by DA_MAN_DA_MYTH ( 182037 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @02:23PM (#5855334) Homepage Journal
    Execute a spammer. It's clean, it's quick, and it's efficient. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

    See if people will keep sending unsolicited email then. Matt Groening had it right with Futurama.

    Computer: "You've got mail!"
    Leela: (Groans)
    Computer: "It's not spam!"
    Leela: Ohhh
    • Execute a spammer. It's clean, it's quick, and it's efficient. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

      What do you consider a spammer? Is it someone who mails regardless of whether they opted in or does this term apply to all people who send e-mail advertisements or newsletters. Many companies run legitimate e-mail marketing campaigns.

      • Re:Want a solution? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Dimensio ( 311070 )
        Simple.
        If it's confirmed opt-in, it's not spam. If a company claims to be running confirmed opt-in, then give them the benefit of the doubt unless a multitude of complaints come in from multiple sources. Otherwise, off with their heads (or, preferrably, flay them alive, soak them in brine and leave them crucified in a field in Kansas).
        • If it's confirmed opt-in, it's not spam. If a company claims to be running confirmed opt-in, then give them the benefit of the doubt unless

          If a company does confirmed opt-ins, tells each customer where they opted in from, and can prove that each customer wilfully opted in, then I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

          If they just send out an email that says at the end: "You've been included in this email because you opted in on one of our associated sites", then I'm going to give them the benefit of a

    • Execute a spammer

      Deleting would be better...
  • .. what AOL should be doing is including penis enlargement gel packs when they mail out their CDs. After a few months when everyone is walking around with John Holmes type girth, the spammers will stop their barrage of penis enlargement emails, thus reducing spam by at least 50%.

    Another good side effect is that the average size of the hand will also be enlarged, thus requiring bigger gloves, thus again which will fuel the economy thus stopping the recession.
  • The scary part is that there are probably another billion left to filter out.

  • Good for them!!! (Score:4, Funny)

    by iwillrefuse ( 576079 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @02:42PM (#5855589)
    Now, if I could only stop these assholes who send me unwanted CD-Rom's to my home 3 times a month...

  • Stop Blocking Spam? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Maybe the solution is to stop blocking spam. If users received the 4,000 emails of spam a day that they would get w/o spam blocking instead of 40, it would turn an annoyance into something that is totally unacceptable. It would be interesting to see what the public would do in such a situation. In other words, that kind of dissatisfaction might force true change.

    • Post your email address here.
      People will assist you making that experience. Then let us know what solution you came up with.

    • The only kind of change that dissatisfaction associated with recipt of spam 'en masse' would be AOL users canceling their accounts. IMHO, the only way for AOL to stay profitable is to continue market themselves as 'User-Friedly' and 'Child-Safe'. That's about one of the only (potential) advantages that AOL has left these days.

      That image is promptly destroyed when little Jimmy starts reading about free pr0n and starts clicking on links to goatse.cx


  • just looking at AOL's numbers, the claim that there are only 180 'problem spammers' starts to lose credibility


    2 Billion emails divided by 180 spammers equals approx 11 millions emails per spammer per day *just to AOL alone*.


    Unless the 'problem spammers' that were alluded to a few days ago are the ones that make it through the blockers, the 2 billion spams are from several thousand 'non problem spammers' (Is there such a thing?)


    • 2 Billion emails divided by 180 spammers equals approx 11 millions emails per spammer per day *just to AOL alone*.


      Simple rule of thumb:
      1 spam = 1 bps.

      11 million spams = 11Mbps or less than a 1/3 of a T3.

      Even if they weren't using relays to multiply the bandwidth, it's doable.

      -- this is not a .sig

      • OK, and how much do 11 Mbps of guaranteed bandwidth cost per month, with a traffic allowance of 3 TB? At least over here in Europe, that's the price decent car. If I were an AOL customer, I wouldn't be willing to have 1 or 2 dollars every month dedicated to fighting spam. I'd prefer to pay 1 dollar every month (together with all other AOL customers) to send out a death squad to execute spammers and their families world-wide. Go figure the impact if Ralsky was found with his head blown off the body in a pi
        • (tasteless alert)

          Given the number of AOL subscribers, if they did take the $2/subscriber and put that towards putting contracts on spammers' heads, the spam problem would diminish sharply within a few months.

    • Re:180 hardcore spammers? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by dubl-u ( 51156 ) *
      2 Billion emails divided by 180 spammers equals approx 11 millions emails per spammer per day *just to AOL alone*.

      The word I hear from a reliable source is that to do spamming as a viable business, you must be sending at least 10 million spams per day.

      So if the low end of the bell curve is circa 10m, it's easy to believe that AOL's share of that can peak at an average of 11m per major spammer. It would make sense for spammers to focus on AOL users, both because there's a lot of 'em in one place and becau
  • this huge amount of spam makes me think of all the people who are walking around with penises 1-3 inches shorter than they could be. makes me feel better, when I look down and smile about my inability to set up an effective spam filter.

  • a *lot* still gets through (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Most AOL users I know still see at least 15 spam messages per day... bad, when most of them only get 1 or 2 legitimate messages a day.
  • but they mean 2 billion messages. There's a big difference here...

    I'll wager that a fairly significant portion of that blocked mail is wanted by the recipients. I know that we get many calls when our AOL recipients don't recieve their expected daily/weekly newsletters.

    • Absolutely correct. However, there are also tons of spam that DONT get blocked. I don't use aol personally, but I wouldn't belive you if you say you dont get spam on aol.
    • I don't think it is large. When you have 2 billion test cases everyday you can make your rules pretty accurate.

    • I know that we get many calls when our AOL recipients don't recieve their expected daily/weekly newsletters.

      Hmmm... I bet there are (or will be) guides on how to create legitimate, opt-in newsletters that do not look like spam to the various filtering technologies out there. For example, even though I registered with mame.dk, their newsletter gets filtered by Hotmail. (Although, it is sent to the Junk Mail folder, not simply deleted or blocked, as I take it that AOL is doing.)

      The downside is that spam

  • That's emails, not spams. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AnotherBlackHat ( 265897 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @03:10PM (#5855870) Homepage
    Funny how nobody ever mentions the false positive and false negative rates in these stories.

    If AOL has a false positive rate of 0.01%,
    That means over 200,000 incorrectly blocked emails per day.

    If they have a false negative rate of 1%,
    That means over 20,000,000 spams got through.

    2 billion sounds like a big number, but it's still only 10-30 spams for the typical AOL user.

    -- this is not a .sig
    • 2 billion sounds like a big number, but it's still only 10-30 spams for the typical AOL user.

      You think AOL has circa 100 million users? Got some stats to back that up? My recollection is it's more like a third of that, meaning an average of 60 per user.And growing exponentially, with no end in sight.

      But even at 10-30, that's still quite a bit when you only get a couple of real messages a day and check your email a couple of times a week, as is typical for the AOL types that I know.


      • You think AOL has circa 100 million users? Got some stats to back that up? My recollection is it's more like a third of that, meaning an average of 60 per user.And growing exponentially, with no end in sight.

        I should have checked my sources more carefully.
        AOL claims over 140 million users of AIM
        Their user base is much less - 35.2 million end of 2002 according to Jupiter Research.
        Like you said, about a 1/3 of what I said.
        Probably slightly higher now, but yeah, it's
        30-90 spams a day per user, not 10-30

    • Here's an AOL page [aol.com] with some customer stats. With 35 million users, and 2 billion messages blocked that's 57 blocked emails per customer!!
    • I'm unfortunatly stuck on aol at home (with the parrents), plus i've had my email address there since I was 9, so I still use the account for my mail. For the past couple years, I've always gotten about 15-25 spams per day, and since AOL claimed to have started blocking it, I haven't noticed any decrease in the spam I get. Of course now there are twice as many Mortgage and Loan messages but few if any penis enlargers and porn.
    • You're making the common mistake that all that e-mail is destined for an actual user. As a mail admin and an active spam fighter, I can tell you that MOST spam is not addressed to any valid user. For every 2-3 spam a user gets, my mail server has to deal with another 5-6 going nowhere!

      It's not just the users time being effected here, it's the money spent on bigger machines, larger support contracts, more man-power and harder to keep SLA's.
  • Since many spam (or appears to) comes from AOL, all they have to do is disconnect themselves from themselves...

    • Re:That's easy. A tale of bouncing AOL spam. (Score:4, Informative)

      by dmeranda ( 120061 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @04:18PM (#5856696) Homepage

      Most email that appears to come from AOL in fact comes from somewhere else. Same for all the big ISPs like yahoo, msn, hotmail, and so on. Not only do spammers forge the From: headers, they are also forging the SMTP envelope MAIL FROM as well.

      Actually we were inadvertently relaying undeliverable spam back to AOL customers and found ourselves blacklisted by AOL until we cleared it up. No, this is not an "open relay" problem; this was an "undeliverable bouncing" problem. But the effect was similar. You really need to be careful because spammers are getting very smart.

      What was happening was that mail which got through our SMTP gateway (running sendmail) and into our back end internal email server (running Exchange) was being bounced as being undeliverable because of the made up recipient addresses that spammers use. The problem was Exchange was creating these "bounces" as NEW email messages rather than as an SMTP DSN rejection, mearly prepending "Undeliverable:" to the subject and sending the message to the supposed sender. But those forged senders turned out to be real AOL user accounts, and being AOL users they flagged our bounces as being spam, and poof, after about 15,000 in one day we got blacklisted....actually I can't blame AOL at all.

      The AOL postmasters were surprisingly helpful and courteous in helping us resolve this. What I now do is to take the connecting IP address and do a reverse DNS lookup. If it is not from within the aol.com or aol.net domains, it is rejected as being forged (regardless of what the headers or even the envelope say). Likewise I also check the responce on the HELO/EHLO greeting to make sure it is also from aol.com. And just as an extra check, I finally configured our sendmail milter interface to use LDAP to the exchange backend server to reject mail for invalid mailboxes before it is ever passed through to our backend server.

      Now if there were reliable was to detect forged mail from the other big ISP players. I can only perform those forgery catching tricks with them because AOL has a policy that ALL outbound mail from AOL will ALWAYS be sent from an SMTP server registered within the aol.com DNS domain. I don't know if that is necessarily true for the other big ISPs.

      • Re:That's easy. A tale of bouncing AOL spam. (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        AOL does the same thing to everyone else. And yes there are reliable way to tell if the mail was actually from who it claimes to be. Just look at the IP of the relay, if it is an MX for aol.com then it is a legit AOL email. It is necessary for everyone. There should not be any open proxies anywhere.

        I have spent hours and hours of time trying to block bounced messages from AOL. They do the same and they usually have 30 mailservers trying to crash my poor mailserver. I use iptables to cut those suckers off,
  • Considering I still get about 80 spams a day, I'm not that impressed with AOL's efforts.

  • Holy crap! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by idleprocess ( 606281 )
    I can't compete with 2bil., but here's my spam blockage for a measly 80 users on Sunday the 27th:

    Postfix log summaries for Apr 27

    Grand Totals
    ------------
    messages

    2454 received
    185 delivered
    183 forwarded
    1 deferred (17 deferrals)
    0 bounced
    2359 rejected (92%)
    0 reject warnings
    0 held
    0 discarded

    3102k bytes received
    3162k bytes delivered
    152 senders
    98 sending hosts/domains
    39 recipients
    2 recipient hosts
    • Having never actually read any spam logs, your post made me think. I never really considered the load on servers and/or internet connections. However, by your numbers:

      3102kB of transfer was generated by 2454 messages. 3102/2454=1.264kB per message

      3102kB of transfer was generated in a system that delivered 185 messages. 3102/185=16.768kB per message delivered.

      16.768/1.264=13.266 times the bandwidth in a spam-full world.

      So it would appear that my ISP is feeling the pain from delivering this spam
  • I'm sure they're blocking a lot of mail. But you can't say it's all spam if you block it -- no one is looking at all of the blocked mail to make sure it's spam. I won an eBay auction from someone with an AOL address and discovered that I can't send mail directly to AOL from my cable modem anymore. Normally I would just let it slide, but since it was a financial transaction I had to use another server. I'm still debating whether to fix it long term or continue to ignore AOL...
    • I can't send mail directly to AOL from my cable modem anymore. Normally I would just let it slide, but since it was a financial transaction I had to use another server. I'm still debating whether to fix it long term or continue to ignore AOL...

      What's your point? For a while now it has been pretty standard fare that the only way to have reliable outbound SMTP traffic is to smarthost it to your ISP's official mail server. There are just too many cable and DSL connections out there that can be hijacked. A

    • Same thing here. I know legitimate email from my server is part of their 2bn figure. AOL may block 2 billion emails a day, but that includes a larger number of false positives than ever in light of their cable/dsl blockage months ago.

      I can't even receive from AOL now as they've landed on a RBL I reference. Not because they're blocking cablemodems (which is their choice), but because their implimentation violates the SMTP RFC. The RBL blocks non-compliant servers, confirmed open relays and smtp agents confi

  • 1/2 the solution (Score:3, Funny)

    by totallygeek ( 263191 ) <sellis@totallygeek.com> on Thursday May 01, 2003 @04:12PM (#5856638) Homepage
    for i in `cat ./aolnets`
    do
    iptables -A FORWARD -j DENY -s ${i} -p tcp --destination-port 25
    done

  • That's just the tip of the iceberg (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 01, 2003 @04:15PM (#5856669)
    Two billion every 24 hours is about right. AOL has LED banners in their offices that show the daily spam count.

    There is the graph they have on the wall in one of their Dulles offices that shows how the filters are working. It's scary, when a new type of spam filter is put out, AOL mail traffic decreases about 60%. The graph line plummets. Then, you watch it creep and spike until barely a month, maybe even a couple of weeks later, it's back up again. The spammers have found another way around it. People joke and laugh about AOL and spam, but AOL is really serious about getting rid of it. It costs them uncountless piles of money just to keep spam from breaking down their walls.

    I have also attended some pretty heavy security conferences about spamming for ISP folks. It's not just a mail flood technique anymore. Spammers are not just some freak in China with an ISP who looks the other way, some spammers are actually crackers. Crackers who break through an ISP's security, just to get around mail filters, or relay it from within. Some of the spam you get is not just because the ISP didn't filter it, it's sometimes because some cracker found a new way to bypass the filter, a back door to the ISP's internal services, so they send it in, even relaying spam from personal accounts. These are not script kiddies doing this, there are bonafide hacking geniuses working as spammers.

    Spam can shut down an ISP, and AOL knows that all too well.

    • So now there are laws making certain kinds of spamming a felony, and cracking is already a felony.

      Two felonies.

      If the public were informed that anyone sending them UCE is engaging in felonious conduct, the public would be less likely to do business with spammers, and businesses would get the idea that spammin is not only unprofitable, but risks their business, massive legal expenses, and jail time.

      Someone should send out an email.

  • A solution to spam (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Peaker ( 72084 ) <{gnupeaker} {at} {yahoo.com}> on Thursday May 01, 2003 @04:29PM (#5856790) Homepage
    There seems to be a solution to the spam problem - but one that is not backwards compatible.

    I have seen this solution posted as a comment to some story in the past - so the credit is not mine, but of some comment writer I do not recall.

    The idea is to create a complicated and expensive hashing algorithm that costs quite a few cycles - and use it as a "signature" for each mail's content, including the from and to addresses.

    This would mean that sending mail could require a few seconds and be cpu-bound instead of network bound, but this is almost nothing for the average mail user. The spammer, however, would be required to calculate the hashes of the hundreds of thousands of mails he is sending - which could be a costly calculation.

    Perhaps, (and this is my idea :), the hash function could be controlled by the server which would require the sender to sign using a function of higher complexity when loads are higher.

    Perhaps (another idea of mine), users could signify as part of their email addresses - the complexity of the hash function required to send them mail, or at least know what complexity of a hash function was used when sending them mail.
    This could allow users to reject mails that weren't at least a bit costly for the sender to send, thereby making spam too costly to practically send.

    White lists can also be used by users to save their friends from the trouble of calculating a hash of their mails - but this is probably unnecessary as it should only take a few seconds at most.

    Ofcourse verifying the mail's hash should be trivial, no matter the complexity of the hash function - and mails with unmatching hashes would simply be thrown away immediately.
    • A great solution, but one which is not possible to implement. Only gradual changes are possible with e-mail, it is too big a thing for such revolutionary change.

      One thing to consider is that there are companies sending legit mail. Subscribe.Ru sends 2-3 million legit e-mail daily. 2 seconds per e-mail means they need a hundred servers doing nothing but calculating the hashes.
      • The solution to that problem is ofcourse the white lists. White lists could allow solicited mail to not be hashed.
        • But how can you prove that the e-mail really came from a white list and not from a spammer? The return address (and most of the headers) can be forged.
          • Firstly, white lists shouldn't be similar amongst different people - disallowing spammers from forging their address into many white lists.

            Secondly, the white list can be a set of public keys rather than a set of addresses - and the white list filtering would verify a cryptographic signature.
  • Tagged Message Delivery Agent (http://www.tmda.net/).

    For mail coming in, the user maintains a "whitelist" of accepted sender addresses. Unknown senders get a confirmation request that says, "Thanks for your mail, please reply or click here to verify you're a legitimate sender".

    For mail sent out, the user's mail gets tagged automatically so the recipient can reply and the reply will be accepted automatically.

    TMDA is GPL licenced, and it works with all the popular MTAs (Postfix, Exim, Sendmail, etc).
    • Whitelists are very useful for a list of your known friends and others you regularly interact with, but suck for casual messages or businesses trying to communicate with customers.

      Think about it, would YOU put up with jumping hoops to get onto someone's whitelist to ask them a single question about their website? Or to get their company's sales brochure?

      Plus, how do I "click here" with my text based mail program? (Pine)

      Like most real world problems, there is no single silver bullet to solve spam.

    • Tagged Message Delivery Agent (http://www.tmda.net/).

      Because I didn't get an answer to this the last time someone brought up TMDA as the "solution" to spam, I'll post it again:

      Uh, and when your confirmation requesting system sends your confirmation request to my confirmation requesting system, can you confirm you'll see and respond to the confirmation request it sends? If you have a hole to prevent this loop, demonstrate that its exploitation isn't the next great frontier of spam abuse.

      • When you send an email to an address, your software has to whitelist the address that you sent it to, and hope that they're replying on the same address. Alternatively or additionally, it could put a code in the subject, and add that to a subject line whitelist as a once-only rule.

        • When you send an email to an address, your software has to whitelist the address that you sent it to, and hope that they're replying on the same address.

          That only covers email relationships started by you via email. You would never see an order confirmation or a message from a company you snail-mailed your resume to, or any number of other common scenarios.

          Alternatively or additionally, it could put a code in the subject, and add that to a subject line whitelist as a once-only rule.

          Codes in th

  • I wonder how many of those 2 billion SPAMS that were stopped were directed to email accounts that do not exist. I know I usually pay more attention to the spam I get personally (very little because of my methodology), but I've seen spam get dumped into our main corporate email account where user1@company-name.com doesn't exist, but we "own" all @company-name.com email addresses. How much spam is sent to fabricated emails (the way those automatic dialers used to start at 111-1111 and work up to 999-9999)?

  • Rate of growth (Score:3, Insightful)

    by megazoid81 ( 573094 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @05:09PM (#5857184)
    According to this post [slashdot.org] on March 5, AOL canned a billion spams. Today, two months later, they canned two billion. In four more months, they will have canned more than one spam for every single human being on earth. Is that fascinating or just a little fucked up?
  • I'd love to know if they set their net too wide, and if so by how much. I know that when I email my parents (who have an AOL account...what can you do?), they sometimes don't get it. Of course, this might have something to do with trying to get them to look at naked celebs/buy mini RC cars/help Dr. Oooongaboonga and myself retrieve millions of dollars we swindled in Nigeria...
  • Shoot people that spam. If spammers started dying, the whole spam phenomenon would come to a screeching halt PFQ.
  • The solution is for ISPs to start billing by bandwidth used, or the number of emails sent. Block out other ISPs or nodes who don't conform to the policy.

    In this way, high bandwidth customers PAY for the bandwidth they use. In this way spamming activity would have to cost efficient and all those idiots emailing you for opportunities in Cameroon condos would quickly lose their money without adaquete returns on such nonsense.
  • I spot spam with multiple email addresses on my own domain. The email address I use here, for example, is TomorrowistSlashDot@alanmrobertson.com. I know that email sent to ScrapplefaceReader@alanmrobertson.com is most likely spam, whereas mail sent to -my first name-@alanmrobertson.com is good.
  • Because I'm on a "dynamic IP" I'm blocked as spam. My IP hasn't changed in over a year, and my server does *NOT* allow open relaying. Thanks AOL, you're really helpful.
  • They started blocking their own mail now?
  • This "alliance" makes me a little nervous, i didnt trust aol or microsoft on their own, but allied together, that kinda makes me nervous.

    There really isnt much a Windows user can do about spam on the client end, so i can understand the need.

    personally, I run my own mailserver, and suc every 4 hours with a databse to update my body checks on incoming mail, between that and some cool rules in KMail I havent seen any spam in my inbox in about 6 months since i set the stuff up.

    as for browsing, i use phonex w
  • If only AOL had blocked 2 billion outgoing spams
  • "The announcement was timed to coincide with the Federal Trade Commission's first public conference on spam, which started Wednesday." AOL announces it blocks 2B spam messages. Disgruntled local ISP client looks in email inbox, see's spam. Client hears the news that AOL blocked 2B spam emails. Client goes to mailbox, retrieves AOL CD, signs up. The next day, happy AOL client goes to email inbox...surprise! That little nugget of news must of been thought up by a former Enron PR person.
  • it seems that one of the ways that they block "spam" is by not allowing any mail from a dynamicIP pool to be delivered. do people think this is a good way to block spam.

    i believe hotmail is doing the same thing
    -yrreb
  • It is sure good to live in Canada. Where the wild untamed Moose, and Eskimos roam the internet in search of AOL, MSN users to insult. Being free from the invasion of mad hatter butterflies from MSN broadband and AOL broadband, I am free to receive all the spam I desire. I get satisfaction in watching the filters send it strait to trash.
    Looking at all the goofy code attached to it's source is an enlightening experience. Its a hoot to mess with it then sent it back, after making it do something else more fun.

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