[brlug-general] Alarm! Political Censorship of Email.

[Tim Fournet]

I'm sorry, but I find it absolutely hilarious that you still believe 
that deliveries of emails from this mass mailing were blocked for 
political and censorship reasons. I know first-hand that when the large 
mail hosts like AOL receive many messages at once from a single sender, 
that sender is subjected to very strict DNS and MTA checks, increasing 
the likelihood that the emails will be marked as SPAM. I have personally 
helped several e-commerce companies with dealing with these situations, 
even though all of their users have opted-in to the lists. I have had 
phone conversions with friendly AOL Postmasters about how to deal with 
these situations, including getting DNS records just right and getting 
on whitelists.

Without going into all the technical details, there are many RFCs that 
deal with correct DNS settings, MTA settings, and SMTP sessions. Most 
mail hosts on the internet only require a subset of them to be correct, 
but AOL in many cases requires much stricter controls. If that's an evil 
thing, then, well, my faith in humanity just makes me want to call it 
over-protectedness rather than sneaky censorship passed down from CEOs 
to their minions. If you want to see technical stuff about what could be 
going on, visit http://dnsstuff.com and http://postmaster.aol.com

I did read the link you posted, and it seems that the mailing list's 
emails were being marked as suspected SPAM and placed into SPAM folders 
on the MSN and AOL systems. The more recent blog postings sounded to me 
like the admins of "truthout" had been working with AOL to get that 
problem fixed, though they won't admit error on their own side.

In summary, my take on the matter is that what some people attribute to 
malice, is often more logically explained by incompetence.



willhill wrote:
> Censorship is insidious.  There will never be a more clear sign than the 
> TruthOut case.  
>
> Network and software freedom are the only cure.
>
> On Thursday 20 September 2007 11:33 am, Tim Fournet wrote:
>   
>> ...And surprisingly enough...... it arrived without being censored!
>>     
>
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