Is AOL censoring its members' email?

[MLS]

I hope this can be answered factually, as I don’t want to get into a debate on the implied political issues. Friend of mine got an email from another friend that said, in part, that AOL has been censoring emails with particular contents, specifically certain URLs of a political nature. Here’s a partial quote of the alleged message from AOL:

Remote host said: 554-: (HVU:B1) The URL contained in your email to
AOL members has generated a high volume of complaints. Per our
Unsolicited Bulk Email policies, AOL will no longer accept email with the URL
contained in your message."

The allegation is that the blocked message is not about a porno or other offensive site, but a political one.

She goes on to say:

One of the other recent e-mails concerned the ‘1,000 bake sales’ that the Democratic party was holding on a Saturday, in neighborhoods throughout the country. It would allow you to search for bake sales in your neighborhood, or sponsor a back sale yourself. The purpose was to get people to meet and discuss important current issues, as well as raise some cash from the bake sale.

and claims that this is one of the issues being censored by AOL.

I don’t use that service, and have no idea if this is in any way accurate. It seems to me that AOL would have better things to do than screen its subscribers’ email for politically sensitive items.

Does anybody have any *factual * information about this allegation?

[DrFidelius]

AOL has an feedback mechanism in place based upon user’s actions. If a large enough number of recipients click on the “Report Spam” button after getting an email that has a given URL, that URL goes onto AOL’s hit list. Anyone attempting to pass that URL along to other “victims” has it blocked, and a message similar to what your friend received is generated.

AOL political policy is not the issue, but the political leanings of AOL users are.

Encourage her to leave AOL as soon as possible. A good DSL service should be available for only about five dollars a month more.

[Fear_Itself]

Noted tech writer Fred Langa, creator of the Langa List, an internet industry newsletter, has reported much the same experience as you:

AOL is at it again. This time, it’s reading inside its members’ emails, and preemptively blocking any messages that contain links to sites that AOL doesn’t want you to see.

Note: I’m not talking about simple mail blocks, where a mail is discarded if it originates from a “forbidden” address. No: AOL is parsing the content of its members’ emails and blocking them even if they merely mention a site that AOL disapproves of.

This happened to my last newsletter issue, when I mentioned a perfectly valid and inoffensive link: http://www.codeproject.com/ . It turns out that last summer, in July, AOL put that site on its naughty list for some unexplained reason, and ever since has blocked all emails that even contain a link to that address.

[MLS]

Thanks to both of you. I’ll leave any discussion of which answer is correct for another forum.

[John_Kentzel-Griffin]

I just sent an email from a netscape.net email address to an aol.com address. I put a couple of links to http://www.codeproject.com/ in the body. The email was received just fine.

They may have fixed that one. If you give me another URL, I can try that too.

[eulalia]

The second site in the OP is probably MoveOn.org, they were doing the bake sale thing last week. Try that one.

[John_Kentzel-Griffin]

An email with a link to MoveOn.org sent to an aol.com address was received just fine. The link worked.

[eulalia]

I do recall that recently I read either here at the Straightdope or on Slashdot that someone had complained about their site being blacklisted accidentally by AOL. They said it had to do with the placement of the ‘Report Spam’ button, that it was easy to hit it instead of what the person reading the mail meant to hit. I suspect the administrative people are getting a lot of complaints on that score, so maybe they’ll change the layout of things in the next upgrade.

[Dan_Norder]

This has absolutely nothing to do with censorship and everything to do with preventing spam, or what is perceived as spam by the recipients.

If links that get blocked are political, it’s likely that someone (not necessarily the site owner) sent out tons of emails promoting it to a bunch of strangers. At the volumes needed to flag the mail blocker, it must have been purposefully mailbombed at some point, or perhaps part of a large mailing list (or more than one smaller llist) that recipients didn’t remember signing up for.

[MLS]

Thanks again, all. I’ve passed this info along to my friend and to her correspondent. Much appreciated.