Don’t Like AOL’s Email Postage Idea? Don’t Try to Tell Anyone With an AOL Account

By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

You may remember our earlier stories on email postage as well as the petition drive against it. AOL and Yahoo are both looking into this, but AOL is far ahead. Sometime early today (Thursday), AOL starting bouncing emails with the URL DearAOL.com in them. Why? Perhaps because DearAOL.com is a group of companies and individuals working to stop AOL’s adoption of GoodMail’s CertifiedEmail, which amounts to a form of email postage or, as DearAOL.com calls it, an “e-mail tax”.

A e-mail sent by CNET News.com to an AOL.com address and containing the URL “www.dearaol.com” bounced back on Thursday afternoon with a system administrator note that read: “The e-mail system was unable to deliver the message, but did not report a specific reason.”

AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said late Thursday that AOL e-mails mentioning Dearaol.com would now be delivered as normal. The issue, he said, arose late Wednesday because of a software glitch that “affected dozens of Web links in messages,” including the Dearaol.com. Source: News.com

We Say: It’s not surprising that once News.com brought this to AOL’s attention it was fixed. The question is: why did it happen in the first place? “Dozens of Web links in messages”, eh? Hmmm. I wonder.