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Truthout Gets Blocked, Screams Censorship
Sep 25, 2007 1:17 PM , By Ken Magill
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Online political group Truthout.org is crying foul over Hotmail and AOL blocking its e-mail from reaching subscribers.

But rather than conducting an internal assessment of its e-mail program to find out why it’s having delivery troubles at two of the largest providers of e-mail inboxes, the organization’s executive director, Marc Ash, is calling on subscribers to pressure the ISPs into delivering their mail.

“It is becoming increasingly apparent that the Free Email Services—all of them—are a morass,” wrote Ash in a post to subscribers. “You are a commodity to these administrators and as far as they are concerned your rights are your problem, not theirs.”

He added: “We intend to fight this.”

He also called on subscribers to complain to the ISPs. “NOTHING works better than public pressure,” he wrote. “They can ignore us; they can’t ignore you. “

Ash’s approach to his deliverability problems couldn’t be more wrongheaded.

Large ISPs do not block e-mail arbitrarily, and certainly not because of the political content of messages.

“In all of my years at AOL, I can tell you that AOL never intentionally blocked an organization for their political views. I would not have allowed it,” wrote the former head of AOL’s anti-spam team, Carl Hutzler, in a blog post about Truthout’s delivery troubles.

Truthout isn’t the first political organization to get its messages blocked, he added.

“I remember AOL automatically blocked the DNC and RNC [Democratic and Republican National Committees] repeatedly in election years for bad complaint rates and high bounce rates,” he wrote. “Eventually these groups even told us that they bought ‘lists of likely voters’ and e-mailed them. And as such, complaint rates and bounces were off the charts.”

AOL, Yahoo and Hotmail use spam-complaint rates—the number of people who press the “report spam” button—as the No. 1 gauge to determine whether or not to block incoming messages. By all accounts, a complaint rate of more than 0.5% will result in delivery troubles.

Another gauge is an e-mailer’s bounce rate. Sending to dead addresses is classic spamming behavior. As a result, e-mailers who hit too many bad addresses can also find their messages blocked.

That two large ISPs are blocking Truthout’s messages independently of one another is a sure indicator that Truthout’s spam complaints are too high, that it’s mailing too many bad addresses or some combination of the two.

“These ISPs are competitors. They’re not sharing this kind of data back and forth. It’s not like a credit-bureau kind of thing where they’re using the same data,” said Al Iverson, director, privacy and deliverability for e-mail service provider ExactTarget. “It’s very simply a technical issue. In the case of AOL and Hotmail, there is a big sign on the door that says if you want to come in here, you have to do ‘X,’ ‘Y,’ and ‘Z’.”

According to Iverson, Truthout could easily clean up its act by doing the following:

  1. Signup for the feedback loops—programs that provide spam-complaint reports—at AOL and Hotmail.
  2. Make sure they unsubscribe people who complain.
  3. Make sure addresses that bounce get unsubscribed automatically.
  4. Apply for whitelist status at AOL.

Or, he said, Truthout could move to an ESP where these processes will get handled automatically.

“Sad to see Truthout wasting their time playing the blame game, instead of fixing their practices,” wrote Iverson on his blog.

Truthout’s Ash did not respond to an e-mail asking him if he’d taken any steps to clean up the organization’s e-mail practices.



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