Open letter to AOL customers

[mosc]

To customers of AOL...

Recently AOL has instituted some new email policies which have resulted in mail messages from our servers being bounced. It seems that any AOL member can submit an email message to AOL that they identify as spam. AOL will think blacklist the IP address of the originating server. This means that no one using AOL will be able to receive messages from anyone who uses the same mail server as we.

I have contacted AOL and they have taken immediate measures to remove us from the blacklist. This will take according to them about four or five days.

I have also registered our IP for their whitelist. For this I had to give them personal information which I object to, but sometimes you have to do things you don't like when you play with a 300 kilo guerrilla.

I will continue to jump through hoops to work with AOL, but I can't guarantee how long this can continue. They are publishing "standards" on their websites that email servers must comply with in order to exchange email with them. So far, I have no problems complying with these standards, but I have bad feelings about AOL.

If you are an AOL customer, I would consider moving to another more progressive ISP. In fact, I recommend you do so at your earliest convenience. If you aren't getting email from electro-music.com, who knows who else you aren't getting email from?

[v-un-v]

Mosc, I'm 100% in support for you on this one.

AOL are a nasty bit of work- who I was once a customer with. Some people may remember I was an AOL user when I first joined the original NM list.

The blacklisting thing always one of their specialities. If my memory serves me, Justin had some problems with this too. I don't think a 'whitelist' even existed then either.

It was really hard to get rid of them too. They used all kinds of crazy tactics- one of them were nasty and quite manipulative salereps and random nuscence phone calls at odd times- 1471 revealed the same AOL number, but no one at home sort of thing- very odd behaviour.

Hotmail are another one to avoid too.

Neither are list friendly and they bung the system up with html and lots of other crap, so do what the wise man says and bin 'em :)

[Kassen]

If anybody has trouble with this; I have about a metric million of Gmail invites to spare. Just ask.

[mosc]

Personally, I'd avoid Gmail (Google), Yahoo and Hotmail (Microsoft) as well. These companies know enough about us. I would feel uncomfortable having them handle all of my email messages. But, to be fair, neither of them has summarily bounced messages from our servers before.

[paul e.]

[Kassen]

I have "real" accounts too, running on our own servers with our own virus-scanner and spam filter; I don´t see why your ISP would be more trustworthy then Google. If I need to discuss something that realy needs to remain private I meet in person.

Still; for board-related comunication G-mail is pritty nice.

[paul e.]

[Kassen]

I read those and there was nothing in there that woried me; for a free acount I think Gmail is quite nice and it comes with a spam filter that actually works.

I just want to have multiple email acounts because from time to time servers can and do go down; in that case it´s nice to have something like Gmail since I think Google is amongst the world´s best in making sure service doesn´t go down. I tries to sell me guitar pickups and t-shirts because I discussed those. I don´t realy mind the small text adds so that´s fine. I considder small adds a fair trade against being sure I won´t be cut off from the world if the mailserver for my own domain (which like my site is on a privately owned computer on a big but consumer level connection) goes down.

Look; for some applications, like being informed about incoming private messages Gmail turns out to be superior to AOL. If people think that´s important I have 50 Gmail invites that I´ll happily share; I´m not forcing it on anybody who doesn´t want them. AOL probably uses their user´s info too...

[zynthetix]

I have to back Kassen about gmail as well, for the same reasons. While the whole thing is similar to Yahoo and MSN, there is still a complete lack of advertisements similar to google's front page. You can actually read your e-mail instead of being blinded by flash advertisements. The other cool thing is they provide pop and smtp access...meaning you can use your favorite mail program to send and recieve messages instead of the web browser interface. This is something that got killed by yahoo long ago. It makes the whole thing great for newsletters, etc....and imho its still far better than AOL.

I remember many years ago when I switched from AOL to Erols internet (since bought by RCN). My [dial up] connection speed increased from a variable 28.8kbps to a steady 46,666kbps. Makes me wonder if the broadband is any different...

[Kassen]

I think that instead of selling "kassen lives in the hague, is interested in X and his email adress is Y" Google is selling data like "there is a 32% corelation between interests in guitar pickups and desirering to print shirts". At least that´s what I gather from their help-files. Considering the quality of the service I don´t realy have a problem with them mining for that sort of data.

The algorithem is quite good too; it wasn´t fooled by some random words taged at the end of mails when I tried to trick it into advertising weird stuff. According to the documentation it also tries to avoid offending people.

this sounds quite reasonable to me

[paul e.]

well i am not saying they are acting like the Thought Police....yet, anyway hehe

[Yorky]

Lets face it, AOL are pretty obvious, why else would they be on version 2428868686 of their 'browser'

[softfreak]

e- mail ?

try mine : www.gmx.net

1Gig for free.
ok, it`s german, but it does it`s job perfectly.

rob