AOL Blocking Website
Letter to AOL Postmaster Describing Website Blocking Problem

April 9, 2007

Dear AOL Postmaster,

Thanks for your email. Anthony in your support center was very helpful in dealing with our problem today when I called him at 4 PM. I just wanted to add a few comments in order to help resolve our issue.

I am the executive director of a small nonprofit named PEERS (https://www.peerservice.org), which manages several websites and email lists. We have over 4,000 subscribers to our email lists. The subscription process for all of our email lists is double opt-in, so that after subscribing, each new subscriber is sent an email and must confirm that they indeed want to subscribe before they are added to our subscriber database. This is to avoid any unintentional or unwanted subscriptions, and to avoid any accusations of spam. We also have instructions on how to unsubscribe from the list at both the top and bottom of every email we send out.

Approximately 10% or 400 of our 4,000 subscribers use AOL for their email service. We send out emails to our main email list every four days on average. We never send out any emails to those who are not subscribed and never engage in any activity which would be considered spam.

A short while ago, we discovered that our subscribers who used AOL for their email service stopped receiving our emails. After contacting about a dozen of these subscribers, all agreed that the last email they received from us was on 3/24/07. None of them received the next email we sent on 3/28/07, nor have they received any of the emails we have sent since. Thus it appears this problem began sometime between 3/24 and 3/28.

After running a variety of tests with a number of our subscribers who use AOL, we discovered that though they, as AOL users, could send out email with the URL of one of our websites - WantToKnow.info - mentioned in the email, anyone who was not an AOL user who tried to send an email to an AOL user which included the term "WantToKnow.info" anywhere in the message found that their email was blocked and returned with a 554 error message. So it appears for some reason that a block or filter has been placed on the term WantToKnow.info for emails from non-AOL users to AOL users.

I understand that if several AOL users were to make a complaint about our website, it might be blocked. I would like to recommend that before a block is placed on any website like this, you contact the website first to see if there might be a legitimate reason or resolution to the problem being mentioned by AOL users who have made a complaint. Otherwise, it appears that you are censoring that website.

I cannot imagine any reason any AOL users would complain about our work other than political, as our website does deal with political issues. We've received many emails of support from our AOL users for our work, so the vast majority very much support us. If they don't like our work, it is very easy to unsubscribe, as mentioned above. Because of what happened, I have to wonder if we are either being censored by AOL for our political work, or if a group of people who do not like our work have staged a complaint campaign with AOL to get us black listed. You could avoid accusations of censorship by communicating with any website before blocking it.

After calling your support desk today, Anthony checked your system and could find no block of the WantToKnow.info URL. Yet we've had confirmation from over 40 people who are not AOL users that all emails they send to AOL users which mention WantToKnow.info in the text are returned unsent with a 554 error message. We would very much appreciate your help in resolving this matter and letting us know what we might do to avoid this problem in the future. Thanks much for you help, and please let us know if you need any further information.

With best wishes,
Fred Burks
Executive Director of PEERS (https://www.peerservice.org)

Note: Thanks to help from our many supporters, this issue was resolved on April 10, 2007. For more on all that happened, click here.


----- Original Message -----
From: "AOL Postmaster" <[email protected]>
To: < >
Sent: Monday, April 09, 2007 4:09 PM
Subject: AOL Operations Ticket 1380785 created


> You are receiving this email, because you recently contacted the AOL
Postmaster Help Desk.
>
> Your delivery issue has been escalated to AOL Operations. Ticket number
1380785 has been created for this issue. Estimated response time is 24 to 48
business hours, this time may be increased during high demands.
>
> To provide additional information, respond to this email leaving the
ticket number in the subject line. The response must originate from this email address.
>
> This ticket number was generated for IP(s):
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> Note: This mailbox does not accept attachments.
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> Thank You,
> AOL Postmaster

AOL Blocking Website