Are we looking for solutions, or just ranting? (was Re: Comcast and SORBS)

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Robert L Krawitz writes:
| You're not a customer of AOL, so there's very little business reason
| for AOL to listen to you.  If you have a problem with AOL's practice
| in this regard, you need to get AOL's customers to object to this
| practice, which I suspect will be difficult, since AOL sells itself as
| an easy to use service that emphasizes blocking spam and other
| nasties.  They're not likely to care in the least that you have to
| route your mail through your service provider.

Funny story: Last Spring, when AOL started blocking  all  email  from
rcn.com  addresses,  we  had RCN service, and my wife Shelley was the
captain of a local tennis team.  For some reason, half the  team  had
email  through AOL.  Suddenly all her messages to them bounced with a
nasty message that made it clear that AOL was intentionally  blocking
rcn.com  email.   This  was  not  email  send  directly from our home
machine; RCN blocked outgoing port 25, so we couldn't do  that.   She
was relaying the team messages through the RCN SMTP server, and still
AOL rejected the messages.

Eventually, I hear, AOL put RCN's server back on the good-guys  list.
But  for  this  tennis team, it was too late.  They had discussed the
issue (and looked at the evidence that I provided them ;-).  They all
decided  to  switch to other email suppliers.  So AOL lost a bunch of
customers.  As I understand it, this wasn't an isolated case.

Another funny thing was that AOL was heavily advertising  that  their
incoming email was something like 90% spam, which they were blocking.
Various people suggested that they could do  even  better.   If  they
would block 100% of incoming email, they would block 100% of incoming
spam. Somehow I suspect that AOL's management didn't see the humor in
this.

I also had isolated cases of email failing the same way, and in  each
case,  I  was  able  to  persuade the person to switch to a different
email service.