RE: *** ADMIN: Terms of Service Violations reported to AOL -- BPCS-L

I used to be an AOL customer. They market to the lowest common denominator of customer and customer service person.

My guess is that someone joined this list, then forgot the steps needed to unsubscribe, or signed up, then found the content of the list to be other than expected, or no longer is an employee at the company, and someone else there now wants to stop the subscription but not know how, so they report the no longer wanted subscription as SPAM.

Many ISPs try to help deal with SPAM and other unwanted stuff, but the false positive rate is a problem. Reminds me of when with phones before caller-id, that there was a high rate of complaints to the phone companies and police, with them limited budget to deal with it, came up with all kinds of idiotic rules that did nothing to solve the phone spam problem, just limit the ISP costs dealing with customer complaints.

Perhaps David's moderator rules would permit him to "mine" the subscriber list to identify all those who are AOL members, and contact them privately to ask if any have a problem with this list ... how many can there be?

Links to AOL Terms of Service for non-AOL people:
http://legal.web.aol.com/aol/aolpol/

People take AOL to court
http://www.nylawyer.com/news/04/09/092904c.html

AOL's definition of SPAM sent FROM US members of AOL got changed ... a news story that does not really tell us what the new rules are http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,39020381,2137282,00.htm

AOL abandons Microsoft's Sender ID technology to filter unwanted e-mail being sent to its millions of members, and instead embraces an open-source friendly alternative. http://www.keralanext.com/news/?id=50483

Quoting http://spam.abuse.net/goodsites/a.shtml

<http://www.aol.com>America Online (6 Oct 1996) AUP: <http://www.idot.aol.com/aol-aup/>AOL TOS Abuse contact: <mailto:abuse@xxxxxxx>abuse@xxxxxxx Despite plastering the computing world with free trial diskettes, a virtual come-on to spammers that use throw-away accounts, AOL manages to keep the level of outbound spam under control

I beg to differ.

AOL's "Dirty Word" List ... using one of these words in an e-mail is a violation of their TOS examples: a-s-s b-r-e-a-s-t various vulgar words for portions of anatomy associated with s-e-x or using the toilet some usage like h-o-t or D-i-c-k depends on the context Warning ... I found the content at this url to be sufficiently disgusting and indecent as to illustrate the need for an ISP to have some censorship rules. http://www.lectlaw.com/files/elw06.htm

It is a violation of AOL TOS to say that "AOL service s-u-c-k-s"
http://anti-aol.org/faqs/aas/faq1.html

AOL TOS Controversies
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-201927.html?legacy=cnet

Humor
http://www.joke-archives.com/aol/aolrules.html

IETF disbands working group on anti-spam
http://www.internetweek.com/allStories/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=47902534

, you wrote:

What a truly stunning and Orwellian policy.  The reason I asked is that
I personally didn't think that there was any violation and had wondered
what I missed.  I'd be willing to bet real money that most of the list
would agree.  Can anyone conceive what it is that could be construed (in
some wild flight of fancy) as being a violation?

Mitch Damon, CPIM
Data & Process Integrity Manager
Birds Eye Foods
Rochester, NY
(585) 383-1070 x 250

-----Original Message-----
From: David Gibbs

Damon, Mitch wrote:
> I would be interested in knowing what specific term is being violated.

As would I ... but AOL won't tell me.

Basically AOL is telling me: Someone thinks you are doing something
wrong ... but we won't tell you who thinks this or what they think you
are doing wrong.

david