wrote:
While I am not a fan of AOL they have been consistently among the best
in the industry at keeping spammers from directly using their hosting.
Because of rather poor technical expertise spammers often relay through
AOL servers.

I'm no microsoft fan either but Hotmail nukes spammers fast, again,
their abuse staff isn't very bright but clearly the company does not
have a policy of openly supporting spammers.

Juno and United online have a good, consistant anti-spam record.

All of the ISPs that are also major telecoms have at one time or
another hosted scores of spammers. They seem to take turns wearing
the black hat, or in this case, the pink hat. MCI is currently the
worst and in recent years (when they were Worldcom) has even hosted
a DDOS against Spamhaus for several months.

If the truly white hat ISPs shunned (refused to peer with) the
spam supporting ISPS altogether it would only take about a week
to clean up most of the spam problem. That would mean inconveniencing
their users for about a week, and it would seem that AOL and such
are not willing to do that.

I've tried most of the major ISPs, as well as AOHell, at one time or
another. Most have hosted problem children at times, but AOL has a
yearly renewal clause in their opt-out, unless they've changed it,
wherein if you don't remmber to opt-out in time they go back to selling
your name to the spammers. If they stopped that and handing out free
accts, they *might* get their act cleaned up somewhat. I'd be willing
to have my net and web services disrupted for a week if it meant
cleaning the trash out of the attic. I'd be delighted if it really did
the trick. As long as people are stupid enough to bite when spammers
run a scam, I don't see it happening. And I never underestimate human
stupidity.
/rant off

Dave in Fairfax
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