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AOL accused of blocking critical e-mail messages

Who's reading your mail? * Your employer has the right to read any e-mail you send from work, and many companies will automatically filter your mail before it arrives to prevent spam. * Your Internet service provider has access to any e-mail you send from a private account. It will usually filter it for unwanted messages. * If you use a Web-based e-mail account like Google mail or Microsoft's Hotmail, your ISP cannot read your e-mail but the e-mail provider can. The Google mail program will scan your messages to place appropriate advertising on to your screen. The advertisers, however, cannot read your mail. * Law enforcement agencies have the right to read your e-mail if a warrant has been issued. Any ISP in Europe is now legally obliged to keep track of your e-mail and Internet use for potential investigation by the security services. Source: The Guardian

Internet service provider AOL has come under fire after it emerged that the company was blocking e-mails critical of its services.

Users discovered that AOL was screening out messages that included a link to DearAOL.com -- a Web site which campaigns against recent decisions made by the ISP -- after realizing that such e-mails were mysteriously failing to reach their destination. ISPs provide customers with a connection to the Internet.

After the complaints began to appear, DearAOL's backers began to test the problem for themselves.

"I tried to e-mail my brother-in-law about DearAOL.com and AOL sent me a response as if he had disappeared," said Wes Boyd, a backer of the site. "But when I sent him an e-mail without the link, it went right through."

Some activists say that e-mail censorship is a problem which could affect millions of people without their knowledge.

"The fact is ISPs like AOL commonly make these kinds of arbitrary decisions -- silently banning huge swaths of legitimate mail on the flimsiest of reasons," said Danny O'Brien, a spokesman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights campaign group.

AOL, which has around 20 million subscribers in the US and more than 2 million in the UK, insisted that it had not actively censored the e-mails.

"We've been accurately and responsibly delivering tens of millions of e-mails containing that Web link, and we will continue to do so," said Nicholas Graham, a spokesman for the company.

Graham blamed a "software glitch" for the problem, and said DearAOL had been mistakenly identified as a site run by e-mail spammers. Like most ISPs, AOL runs a filtering program to try to prevent unwanted messages clogging up users' inboxes. Technicians fixed the block within 24 hours.

DearAOL.com consists of an open letter that attacks the company's decision to begin charging to deliver some e-mail. The plans, announced in February, will introduce a special tariff that companies or individuals can pay to guarantee that an e-mail will bypass spam filtering systems. It is thought the system will cost between US$2.50 and US$10 per thousand e-mails. Other providers such as Yahoo are considering the system, but it has yet to be implemented.

"This system would create a two-tiered Internet in which affluent mass e-mailers could pay AOL a fee that amounts to an `e-mail tax' for every e-mail sent," says the letter, which has gained more than 350,000 signatories since it was launched two months ago.
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