AOL Accused of Collateral Damage in Spam War

America Online’s latest battle in the spam wars has sparked criticism from online groups who say its policy of blocking email from dynamically-assigned IP addresses is creating too much collateral damage with legitimate email relay users.

Online discussion sites such as slashdot.org have been piling up postings lately over AOL’s recent move to block residential broadband users on AT&T/Comcast’s system from using public relay mail channels in order to reach AOL members with email.

AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said the effort, which began in late March, has helped it reduce its spam complaints in some instances by 90 percent. “We have been working cooperatively, with a range of broadband providers to mutually identify dynamic IP addresses of their customers not using proper email relays to send AOL members emails,” he told internetnews.com.

“Our job has been to be guided by our members (who complain about the spam) and go after the spammers using email relay servers as their command and control centers.”

But as a result, complain critics, residential and especially small businesses that use residential broadband accounts to send emails with different addresses than that of their ISPs are blocked out too.

The issue is increasingly pitting commercial ISP providers’ anti-spam efforts against online groups who bridle at the notion of large, commercial ISPs taking unilaterial measures to block who can send mail and who can’t.

It goes against the codes of conduct about email and networking, said Karsten Self, who demonstrated the blocked header he received when he tried to email an AOL member from his DSL connection.

“AOL is violating a standard of people sending large quantities of mail,” said Self, who is active in the free software movement.

He said AOL needs to create more effective filters for the problem, rather than block groups of email senders who use relay channels to send bulk mail.

“It’s like they’re saying ‘we don’t want to deal with your kind,'” said Self, who describes himself as active in the free software movement.

“How much further down this path of large ISPs slicing out the ‘unwanted’ … before all ISPs will simply stop passing packets past their own networks which do not originate from their servers or a ‘registered business partner’ of some sort,” said another post to a Linux discussion list where the slashdot.org thread originated.

“I think we are on a long slow decline of SMTP ,” said another.

Graham said since the program was implemented in late March, AOL has been able to block 90 percent of spam. Now, he said AOL is working with Baby Bell and DSL provider SBC to implement the blocking program on its network as well as other ISPs such as ATTbi.

Graham said individuals who are blocked will get a note about what’s happening, telling them they should contact their ISP broadband providers to make appropriate adjustments on their ranges when sending out the emails.

“We have worked it out with individuals that may be inadvertently affected,” he said. “As long as the broadband users are using normal channels of mail relays of operators, they should have no problem sending email to AOL members,” said Graham.

“We have made it clear that we don’t accept connections from broadband residential dynamic IP addresses that we have identified as engines of spam.”