Spider Trax

AOL’s Bizarre Anti-Spam Approach

It looks like AOL at up to their old tricks again.

I’ve never used AOL (I’m not that stupid) but I understand that their default email client includes a “This Is Spam” button which their users are encouraged to hit every time they receive what appears to be junk email. The application then sends out an auto-generated spam report to AOL.

So far, so good. Except that, from what I have seen, the application is reading the headers incorrectly in situations where mail is being automatically forwarded, on request, and incorrectly identifying the forwarding mail server as the spammer! As a result, one of my users has been sending in spam reports accusing himself of sending spam to his own account. What is even worse is that, instead of identifying such “reports” as false positives, AOL is taking them seriously and has started threatening to blacklist entirely innocent hosting companies for providing standard email forwarding services.

Entire ISP’s may also be coming under fire. By all accounts, AOL has recently blacklisted NTL. So if you are a NTL user, don’t bother trying to email anyone with an AOL address for the time being. Your mails will just bounce.

If you make use of any mail forwording service to send mail straight onto an AOL address, I would also strongly advise that you are very careful about using the “This Is Spam” button. It just won’t work properly on forwarded emails – only on emails that have come in to your AOL address directly. Unfortunately, you’ll only be able to figure out which ones these are by checking the raw email headers first.

I wonder how long it will take before AOL, once again, attempts to blacklist the entire world?