AOL under fire over Freeserve spam blacklisting

Freeserve and AOL have come under fire from customers angry that their emails are still being blocked because the configuration of some Freeserve servers falls foul of AOL's spam blacklisting policy.

Several Freeserve customers have contacted silicon.com over the past month to complain that their emails to AOL addresses are being bounced back with a message saying "this server is generating high volumes of member complaints from AOL's member base" and that it will block further emails from that server as part of its "unsolicited bulk email" policy.

One annoyed Freeserve customer told silicon.com: "I find this ironic since most of the spam I get emanates from AOL."

Another customer, Christopher Quinton, managing director of Halarose and an Oxfordshire District councillor, said his emails to AOL addresses have been blocked for several months.

"About a month ago, when I threatened to get my solicitors involved, they then allowed my messages through. Now they have started stopping them again. If they persist I will ask my solicitors to take action against them," he said.

Freeserve said the problem is caused by the configuration of its mail servers to deal with users who have mail accounts with other ISPs, which leads to email traffic being re-routed through a different outgoing mail server.

A spokeswoman said: "It is these 'special' mail servers that cause email to be bounced by AOL due to them not being in their allowed list of Freeserve mail servers."

She said this decision was taken jointly by Freeserve and AOL and a process exists whereby following a request from AOL, Freeserve will contact an affected customer and advise them how to change the mail settings to the correct ones to resolve the problem.

AOL admitted the ongoing issue with the configuration of Freeserve mail servers but said this had been compounded over Christmas by the addition of new Freeserve servers that were not immediately added to AOL's 'whitelist'.

But an AOL spokesman said the volume of email affected "represents a very small amount relative to the total proportion".

Freeserve customers were hit by spam blacklisting back in August last year when some customers had emails bounced back with mail delivery failure notifications pointing them towards DSBL.org, which maintains a list of "dangerously misconfigured" servers open to abuse by spammers.