Re: OT : aol blocking URLs with IPs rather than hostnames?

[Adam Lanier]

On Mon, 2006-10-02 at 12:52 -0700, Ken A wrote:
> 
> The web page says that it's a policy, not an error. Perhaps the rule 
> misfired and they backed it out, but it looks like they have every 
> intention of blocking URLs in email that consist of IPs rather than 
> hostnames.

Perhaps we're speaking about different issues here.  The appropriateness
of the policy on AOL's website is not the issue I was responding to
although it may indeed be the issue you're bringing up.

On the SPAM-L mailing list, several incidents were reported today
regarding this policy:

http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/554hvuip.html

However, in the reported instances, the emails in question didn't
contain any URL's containing numeric IP addresses.  One, in fact, was
reported only to have an elipsis '...' in the body of the message.

Other purportedly offending body contents were:

"CNN Interactive email id:59531217083351400" in a plain text email!!

and this

"http://f.chtah.com/i/32/392907741/700px_spacer.gif";

AOL reported that there was a problem with the code that handles the
enforcement of this policy and it was temporarily removed while the code
was corrected.

As far as AOL's policy, I say more power to 'em.

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