Re: Bounced email.

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Bill Garber wrote:

"someone?" wrote:

>> AOL isnt the only ones doing that.  As people crack down tighter and
>> tighter on the SPAM issue, a lot of them unwittingly also close off
>> legitimate sources.  (I know we do!)  We dont block class C's, we
>> block the entire class B.  This cuts down the Spam from hundreds a day
>> to a bare trickle of one or two each day.
>>
>> However, it seems that some bigger companies including AOL and Apple
>> have had this problem of blocking legitimate people on a large scale
>> (we were the victum of the Apple blockage).  But they do fix it.  In
>> our case it took waiting a weekend, calling Apple and being on the
>> phone for 2 hours but they did fix it.  If you have the paitience to
>> deal with the companies, then I say, call them and complain directly.
>> If you dont, they dont know oyu have the problem.
>
>That makes a lot of sense. I mean a very large closed web site
>such as AOL must have serious problems in that area. I know
>that when I did some testing and security work for them in the
>early days it was tough keeping out some of the major hackers.
>I thought about calling them but I'm afraid that they may be blocking
>some on an individual basis too. I mean they gave me 3 extra free
>periods and when it came down to I had to start paying I cancelled,
>and they may simply be blocking people on that basis. I would
>hate to think that in the USA that could happen, but I've seen more
>strange things than that on the internet. Anyway, I will call if it
>goes on for too long.

They would have no ability to block you, specifically, because
they have no way to know your email address.

When major nodes block traffic from major regions of the IP address
space, it is done only sporadically, in response to a transient load,
not over a prolonged period of time (although there may be some
punitive exceptions for specific spam-abetting domains).  This
means that most mail servers will have the opportunity to retry
later and get their messages through, while in the meantime
major spam barrages can be found in cooperative servers' retry
queues and cancelled.

There is no conspiracy to fragment the net, except on the part of
certain "filtering" governments, and they have their hands full plugging
the leaks...

-michael

Check out amazing quality 8-bit Apple sound on my
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/