Att.AOL user's (long)

[campingcop]

) Found this on the web.

AOL Madness

> AOL is at it again. This time, it's reading *inside* its members'
> emails, and preemptively blocking any messages that contain links to
> sites that AOL doesn't want you to see.
>
> Note: I'm *not* talking about simple mail blocks, where a mail is
> discarded if it originates from a "forbidden" address. No: AOL is
> parsing the content of its members' emails and blocking them even if
> they merely *mention* a site that AOL disapproves of.
>
> This happened to my last newsletter issue, when I mentioned a perfectly
> valid and inoffensive link: http://www.codeproject.com/ . It turns out
> that last summer, in July, AOL put that site on its naughty list for
> some unexplained reason, and ever since has blocked all emails that even
> contain a link to that address.
>
> When my list-host ( http://dundee.net ) noticed huge numbers of AOL
> emails bouncing back, they preemptively sought to find out why, and the
> folks at AOL then removed the block--- on that one address.
>
> AOL's mail system is just this side of insane. Not only does it read
> inside member emails for links that AOL doesn't like, but--- as we've
> reported before--- if AOL members get a little lazy and block a
> newsletter like this one, instead of unsubscribing, AOL keeps track of
> the blocks. Last time I looked, if as few as 10 readers took the lazy
> way out of stopping a mailing, AOL would assume that the mail in
> question was spam. In my case, if just 10 AOL users out of 160,000
> readers--- that's 0.00006 of my readers--- took the lazy way off the
> list, all AOL subscribers would have their legitimate issues blocked for
> some time thereafter.
>
> AOL's user-level mail filters are nearly useless because the master
> filters discard emails before they ever make it to the users' mailboxes
> and the local filters there. That means AOL members can white-list
> senders to their heart's content but it will have no effect at all on
> the pre-filtering that's done by AOL before their mail ever gets
> delivered. AOL's user-level mail controls are a little like those fake
> thermostats you sometimes see in office buildings that are meant to give
> occupants the illusion of local control, when in reality, a central
> system is making all the real decisions.
>
> Noted tech writer Brian Livingston also has been struggling with this,
> as he reported in http://briansbuzz.com/w/040408/ . Just look at the jaw-
> dropping failure rates he found:
>
>      I've written many times that Internet service providers (ISPs)
>      are mishandling the growing menace of spam by imposing crude
>      "junk-mail filters" that delete legitimate messages without
>      notifying the intended recipients of that fact.
>      
>      ...AOL "bounced" about 88% of the newsletters that had been
>      sent to subscribers who use aol.com e-mail addresses. The
>      problem was also severe at subsidiaries owned by AOL,
>      including cs.com (which bounced 88%) and netscape.net (96%).
>      
>      ...[AOL's] filter simply deletes huge quantities of mail
>      without ever delivering it...
>      (click link above for full article)
>
> If you have friends on AOL, you may wish to tell them about this (
> http://www.langa.com/sendit.htm ) so they'll know why their email is so
> unreliable. Of course, there's no guarantee they'll see your email, just
> as there's no guarantee that legitimate subscribers to this newsletter
> on AOL will get this issue....
>
> But there's a glimmer of hope: For the first time ever, AOL's membership
> has started to shrink significantly. Users are finally realizing they
> can get better service at lower costs from other ISPs. Perhaps if enough
> members vote with their dollars, AOL will wake up and meaningfully
> change its Big Brother-ish ways.
>                                    
>

[birol]

Is this a joke or do they really do that