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! >> > > _______________________________________________ > General mailing list > General at brlug.net > http://mail.brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net >
