AOL holes again.

Alan Clegg abc at bsdi.com
Tue Mar 20 18:18:36 UTC 2001


Unless the network is lying to me again, Eric A. Hall said: 

> Actually it appears to be a problem with earthlink (nee mindspring). I've
> been gettting a lot of spam from their server lately, and judging from the
> headers it appears the mindspring servers are configured to relay mail
> from any system that puts [mail.]mindspring.com in the HELO banner.

That may be the case, but the fix is not to put any server that generates
"lots of mail" into the bitbucket.  I've been getting complaints from a
number of list members (no spam or relaying from mailinglists.org, I
promise) that folks on AOL suddenly stopped getting the majority of their
list mail.

If the MSNBC article is anywhere near correct (yeah, a big assumption) then
what AOL was doing was black-holing any "high-volume" source.  While that
is a noble goal, the fact that any mailing list would fall into that 
category is pretty lame.

It seems to me that if you were an AOL client and suddenly all your
nanog at merit.edu mail vanished, you might consider that what they did
was NOT the right thing.

I decided to contact AOL and called their "press relations" number.  I
talked to "Keith" and he basically admitted to what the article said.
Of-course they were unable to connect me with anyone with real clue, but
they did take my number and I'm awaiting a call back.  "I talked to 
someone in that group earlier today and there are about 70 calls they
are working on, so it may be a while"

This seems to have NOT been targeted against Earthlink/Mindspring, but 
against anyone generating a high-volume e-mail stream.

AlanC
-- 
perl -le '$_="6110>374086;2064208213:90<307;55";tr[0->][ LEOR\!AUBGNSTY];print'

	abc at bsdi.com




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