RSSAOL Claims Success in Spam Fight
By Ed Oswald | Published December 27, 2004, 1:12 PM
America Online announced Monday that for the first time in five years, it has noted a sustainable drop in the amount of spam arriving in its customer's inboxes.
Last November, the largest online service averaged some 11 million spam reports a day from its members. However, a year later that number had dropped to 2.5 million per day, which equates to a 75 percent decrease.
AOL says the success against spam results from work by its antispam division as well as increased enforcement of spam laws by authorities. This is stopping more junk mail "at the door," the company says.
"There is simply much less spam to be served up as members gather for the holidays around the family computer and their e-mail inbox," Carl Hutzler, Antispam Director at AOL said.
The company did say that spam dropped once before in 2003, however "new records for spam blocking and e-mail attempts were set shortly thereafter." Records on spam have been kept by the company since 1996.
Anyone that had any kind of brains would say "Good Bye", to AOL and this thread wouldn't even be here.
I don't need to say anything more about this!
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|why? personally i left AOL years ago becuase it was annoying to launch their client, minimize it after connection and then launch my own client, and truthfully, it was cool to hate AOL. but honestly, it worked great for my prents for 6 or 7 years - then i was able to talk them into broadband and SBC/Yahoo had a better price. but what's wrong with AOL? i'd agree that it dumbs down the internet but so what? my mom doesn't need to know "http://www". tim berners lee even hates that. and it provided extra services from right inside of the program. my mom was part of AOL only boards that she lost in the switch and had to find replacements elsewhere for. so if you're going to bash AOL, provide some reasons. after growing up i know longer have a reason to bash them.
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|I didn't need all those AOL cds that showed up at my door.
Also hate the must have browser and aim open to be online, when say I just want streaming music or another application to use the internet, not aols applications. anti-virus updates, for another example.
I do give them props for making AIM available on Linux though.
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|Actually, AOL finally let you get online without the client. But it was too little too late.
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|As much as I may bash aol, this was an outstanding success. Lower spam for aol users means lower spam clogging the internet in general, and less companies will continue spamming if no one answers the junk mail. Terrific job! Now just equip your spyware detection to get these kind of results.
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|well... duh... there's less spam reported because there are less users using AOL, everyone is cancelling !
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|That's an extremely poor response to make. Yes AOL has lost quite a bit of members, it's nowhere near 75%. AOL isn't even 25% off it's highs.
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|Maybe, but just think about how many of those people had multiple sub-accounts... a lot of rejected addresses and some enhancements of their mail filters makes for a good combination.
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|They aren't taking into account current members not reporting spam out of frustration (i.e. you can click "stop spam" so many times--before it gets real old--it has little effect.)
Perhaps the members that left may have made up a majority of the spam receivers--skewing the results.
This isn't a scientific view of reduction of spam by any means.
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|It's not hard to keep spam down when you block everything under the sun! AOL has taken an iron fisted aproach to the whole spam thing. They don't give their users the choice to block it, they take that initiative for them.
I'd say that about 80% of everything I send to people who use AOL gets bounced due to either my email address (so I can't even send to AOL members from the address), or a link in the body of the email (I even tried scrambling it several different ways)! How is that for ya?! They actually have the gall to reject email based on hyperlinks they find INSIDE YOUR EMAIL! Imagine all the LEGITIMATE email that is never delivered!
I've had to resort to zipping up any links & attaching them whenever they go to an AOL recipient!
They obviously think their users are all feeble minded and can't be trusted to make a few settings themselves.
If this is effective spam control then they can have it!
Sorry to rant, but I've had my fill of frustration from AOL, and that's just from trying to send to their members.
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|funny stuff to hear from a company that still has the worst security holes of all isp's. I wonder if they fixed the cookie hijacking yet. Them saying they aresuccessful in blocking spam is saying they blocked the most common ports and are no longer selling your email addresses to a third party vendor.
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|Good Bye.
edited by gawd21
Dec 28, 2004 - 2:03 AM
Anyone that had any kind of brains would say "Good Bye", to AOL and this thread wouldn't even be here.
I don't need to say anything more about this!
Again, need I say more?
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|eh? As a mail admin with only a few hundred users, I can count on zero hands the number of times AOL has blocked any of our mail in the past 4.5 years-- It hasn't happened.
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|Umm, actually, AOL does give you the choice. You can choose to either block no mail, block mail by a whitelist/blacklist only, or block mail based on their Bayesian filter.
However, even with no mail blocked, they seem to do a little for you--some people unfortunately have problems with things like Yahoo! Groups--but that's nothing new.
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|actually you're only partially correct. AOL has different tiers in the SPAM process, some which you can't stop them from blocking. these are the ones that prevent dictionary attacks, fail dns blacklists and "obvious" spam tactics, the latter of which sometimes produces false-positives. the mail that makes it past this is the mail that people can apply the spam rules to.
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|They also block domains that point to a dynamic IP. I have a domain name that points to a dynamic IP, if I wanted to use an e-mail server as well, my mail would not make it to AOL users. Oh well, I am knowing less and less AOL users anyway.
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