[funsec] AOL Charged With Blocking Opponents' e-Mail

[Larry Seltzer]

Of course they'll make mistakes, so what? AOL makes mistakes with their spam
filtering, does that mean they should do spam filtering? It's precisely
*because* mistakes with spam filtering are inevitable that accreditation
services are useful.

An accreditation service lives entirely on their reputation and AOL sinks or
swims on that reputation too, because the certified messages clearly have a
special status. If they're inappropriate message AOL will be barraged by
complaints and that costs them money and customers. The amount of money they
get from Goodmail customers will never overcome the support costs if it's
implemented badly. 

I don't know what Choicepoint's validation practices were and perhaps they
weren't public. Goodmail's are and you can judge them for yourself:
http://www.goodmailsystems.com/senders/qualifications.php

What really burns me up about this is that there's no rational reading of
the situation in which the amount of spam getting to AOL users increases or
decreases (unless Goodmail is wildly incompetent or corrupt, neither of
which I'm going to assume). Goodmail is not supposed to decrease spam, it's
supposed to decrease false positives. That's all.

Larry Seltzer
eWEEK.com Security Center Editor
http://security.eweek.com/
http://blog.eweek.com/blogs/larry%5Fseltzer/
Contributing Editor, PC Magazine
larryseltzer at ziffdavis.com