AOL spamming policy?!?

Tue Aug 18 21:34:05 UTC 1998

>I've gotten this same message now from four different AOL users today.
>Just wondering if anyone knows if this is just a group of people working
>together to fight spam, or if AOL is doing this, sending e-mail from their
>users without them knowing, or ... ???

That looks like the less than fabulous "spam hater" program in action.
It writes complaint mail automatically, and is very easily confused
by forged headers.

I get enough screwed up spam hater mail at abuse.net that I got the
guy who wrote the program to default the complaints to a special
subdomain of abuse.net just for spam hater users so I can tell them
using simple direct language why they're hosed.

Not much to do about it other than to send them a boilerplate message
encouraging them to learn how to recognize forged headers and to join
CAUCE.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Sewer Commissioner
Finger for PGP key, f'print = 3A 5B D0 3F D9 A0 6A A4  2D AC 1E 9E A6 36 A3 47 