AOL defends spam policy

"What you have here - to use an offline analogy – is someone not properly putting the proper return address or postage on an envelope being delivered by the US Postal Service," said Nicholas Graham, vice president and spokesman for AOL.

Yesterday SC reported AOL had been blocking at least 4,000 emails warning of impending natural disasters, because it had thought they were spam.

But it appears the emails were being blocked because of the manner in which the emails were being sent.

"This Florida agency is unfortunately mimicking a tried-and-true spamming tactic, unbeknownst to them," said Graham. "They are sending out large volumes of emails very rapidly to our AOL members using email servers that are unknown or unrecognizable to us."

AOL has now white-listed the Florida agency so that the emails are no longer blocked.

"This is in no way an issue specific to AOL; senders of large bulks of email who do not properly set up their email process are going to encounter setbacks across the online medium unless they do some "email 101" and know what the email policies are of ISPs across the internet," said Graham. "But if you email like a spammer, you're going to get treated like one."

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