The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.
Can AOL be offended?
: Kathy (Relapsed Catholic) Shaidle writes that AOL blocked email about something she wrote because they received too many complaints about it.
What’s this, censorship by friend network: Censter?
Wow! — my stupid poem, my puny blog, deemed “offensive” by a colossal corporation. My first reaction was that “Banned by AOL” would look great on my homepage. Then I started to wonder, as the anonymous commenter had: Does AOL censor email? And if so how? When and why?
“Eh? Oh, Hell!” does use a “spam block” package, and it is sometimes over-sensitive. Most “freebie” mailboxes do, as I found out when I found Excite was delivering some mail from ZD-Net-uk but blocking some as originating via a “spam” server. Excite actually purchases the blocking service from a third party, probably most do. Which, and how to change the blocklist, are not things in the FAQa. An Excite rep said he could do nothing, I should contact Ziff-Davis and get them to use a different server!!! I asked how I could find out if other non-spam was being blocked, he said I couldn’t – quite believable, those lists are treated as proprietary information – especially since some site-blocking lists were hacked and the wierder blocks were made available.
A few ISP’s also block…
Just read more entries, you already knew the above. Oops.
Just sent the link (from Kathy Shaidle’s poem) to one of my AOL addresses. It went through.
Yeah, the poem is going through now. But I got a funny letter from a guy who got blacklisted for sending out an e-newsletter with a correction to the last issue. He wrote… ‘I blew it’ and got banned. :-)
But as I said in the piece: this is serious stuff if you’re dealing with emailed contracts, RFPs and other business stuff worth real money.
Kathy,
Hmmmm…. If you’re using an AOL account to do business you really are risking it. For what you pay for AOL you could have a real web site and email accounts… (Further Hmmmm…. you DO have a site (blog) but if you’re also doing business you should move completely away from AOL…)
Oh Lord I don’t use AOL at all and never have. Someone tried to send a link from my ‘real’ Blogger site to a friend with an AOL mail account is all.
I’ve been at this for years, so know all about how much they suck. They just suck even more after this.
this happened to me with every aol user on my list for about a week. i got the same notice about “complaints”. then suddenly it stopped.
that was 2 weeks ago, or so.