Chin Music Press - Adventures in Publishing

AOL hits a new low

Anyone out there following the AOL email tax debate? If you are, you may have noticed that Chin Music Press was one of the early signatories of the Dear AOL letter, which says quite simply that AOL should not be allowed to profit from a surcharge it wants to put on mass emails.

Well today, AOL hit a new low and essentially proved our point: It stopped delivering emails that contained the www.dearaol.com URL. Here's a snippet from a press release by the Dear AOL Coalition:

AOL is blocking delivery to AOL customers of all emails that include a link to www.DearAOL.com. Today, after this was discovered, over 150 people who signed a petition to AOL tried sending messages to their AOL-using friends, and received a bounceback message informing them that their email "failed permanently."

While AOL may imply that censoring www.DearAOL.com is part of some anti-spam effort, their own customers are witnessing how faulty AOL’s spam measures would be if that was the case. “I forwarded www.DearAOL.com to my own AOL account and it was censored. Apparently I can't even tell myself about it,” said one AOL customer, Kelly from Massachusetts.

AOL and Goodmail, the company behind the system that would allow approved mass emailers to get their mails delivered for a fee, have paid lip service to nonprofits, saying they would cut them a break by charging them less to send mails. But what about companies like CMP? Since we only have two books and a couple of sites under our belt, we live or die on the Internet and bookstore events. Major reviewers still don't take us seriously, and even some bookstores shy away because we're small. If we can't send out our email newsletters without paying a fee, we lose a valuable marketing tool.

AOL has shown its true colors. If you've been on the fence or just haven't even thought about the idea of a two-tiered Internet — one for the haves; and another less efficient one for the have-nots — I hope you'll consider choosing sides. There have to be somethings that the privateers can't touch. I say email should be one.

Bruce Rutledge >> April 14, 2006

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