In all fairness, it's not just AOL. many other large ISPs and spam-blocking services (such as MAPS--the Mail Abuse Prevention System) have been gunning for SBC recently.
You're a "mushroom"--an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire of a war that does not involve you.
To understand what happened, and why you ended up getting blocked by AOL (and by other ISPs--you just didn't know it), you have to know the background of the war.
SBC (and its affiliates and subsidiaries--PacBell, prodigy, Cingular, and so on) hasn't had a terribly good couple of years. SBC's gross income for 2002 fell by about 5% over 2001, in spite of the fact that Cingular's revenue is up. This has caused many analysts to get a bit gloomy on SBC.
Typically, when most ISPs begin to show slipping revenue, one of the first things they do is trim (or eliminate altogether) their abuse team--the people they pay to read spam reports and cancel spammers' accounts. often, these companies will begin covertly supplying services to spammers as well, because spammers are willing to pay a very high premium to ISPs which will permit them to spam.
SBC has done both.
Starting early this year, SBC began a very quiet policy of permitting large-scale spammers to use SBC mail servers in exchange for service premiums. This has been documented on a number of Web sites
here,
here, and
here (an updated, real-time list of known spammers working from SBC domains).
In fact, SBC has actually
hired known spammers to advertise their services (one such sample spam is
here, with the trace showing its source to be a notorious spam organization
here.
If you read the UseNet newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse, you'll see so many people complaining about floods of UseNet spam originating from SBC sources, and so many reports of abuse complaints by system administrators and ISPs being ignored by SBC, that there is a very real possibility SBC may face what's called a "UseNet Death Penalty." A Usenet Death penalty is an extreme action taken against an ISP that is so lenient on spammers, the entire UseNet backbone refuses to accept any UseNet message from that ISP whatsoever--effectively cutting off all newsgroup access for every subscriber who uses that ISP.
So it isn't just AOL. SBC has a very, very serious problem on its hands--it deliberately and knowingly harbors so many aggressive spammers that much of the Internet community is beginning to rise up against it.
I sincerely hope that SBC realizes that the short-term gains of taking a spammer's money are not worth the long-term losses of a backlash against the entire ISP. But until they do, I think you can expect to continue having problems.
