I'm not an AOL user, never have been, so I have no way of knowing whether this story is actually true. However, it's very disquieting if it is.
NEWS- Excommunicated: AOL blocks Pope mail
From The Hook
When Charlottesville resident Keith Rosenfeld forwarded a link to a humorous article titled "Pope on a Pogo Stick" to a friend of his, he figured his buddy would get a good laugh. Instead, Rosenfeld got an automated response from AOL that has him hopping mad.
"The following recipient(s) could not be reached..." read the error response Rosenfeld received. "...The URL contained in your email to AOL members has generated a high volume of complaints...."
Rosenfeld says he was baffled.
The URL was for a legitimate news story-- posted on the Reuters site-- about a planned UK cartoon show called Popetown, in which the Pope is presented as a "puerile preacher on a pogo stick."
The article cites the uproar the show has generated abroad, including 6,000 letters written to the BBC, which planned to air the show, and an anti-show petition bearing 28,000 signatures. Still, Rosenfeld doesn't understand what business an Internet provider has deciding what's too controversial.
After the first bounce-back, Rosenfeld-- believing the AOL server was just picking up the URL copied into the message field and treating the mailing as spamre-sent the email, this time with just the text of the pogo stick article copied.
Again, the message came bouncing back.
"It shows they're actually scanning the text of every message," says Rosenfeld.
I hope there's some larger coverage news coverage over what ISPs are doing with their "spam filters" in relationship to blocking legitimate emails, and not just talking about the problem of spam. The filtering of email has the potential to become a pretty big political issue by itself.
It's understandable that ISPs do not want to have to pay to send and deliver unwanted spam, and that they don't want customer dissatisfaction about spam to impact their business.
But, as an email user, the loss of one legitimate email through a filter can be a much higher cost to me than all the spam I currently get (and it's mountainous). And when ISPs configure filters for general use by their subscribers, they often filter out some legitimate emails, if from listservs, or autoresponders, or other mechanisms, at the very least. And, in general, ISPs do a very limited job of explaining how filters work, and what the impact would be, to their subscribers.
So - the news media needs to cover this story, and the implications of what filters can cause people to miss - and the possible dangers of misuse of filters. Internet users shouldn't expect spamming filter software to be the final solution in spam - it won't be. Spam won't stop until the costs exceed the benefit.