Word: aol
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Automated antispam software can only do so much, so the four e-mail giants have started to employ a new weapon: humans. People, it seems, learn the rules of this new battlefield faster than machines do. At AOL's new control facility in Gainesville, Va., home to its antispam special-forces unit, workers like Anna Ford scan screens that show blocks of mail entering the system. She's looking, Matrix-like, for suspicious patterns. "Here's someone sending 50 e-mails to 3,000 recipients," says Ford. "That stinks." With one click, the sender is identified as a China-based...
...mail providers are trying to tap into a little of that anger by enlisting the help of aggrieved users. REPORT SPAM buttons now adorn all e-mails in AOL, EarthLink and MSN software, and AOL alone receives 9 million reports a day. That may not be enough to stop the Carmacks of the world, but anything that saves us from a few more cable-descrambler ads can't be all bad. --With reporting by Kathie Klarreich/Miami, Sean Scully/Los Angeles, Eric Roston/Washington, Simon Crittle/New York and Noah Isackson/Chicago
...AOL The largest Internet provider is also the No. 1 conduit for spam, which may explain why each new version boasts ever more powerful spam protection. New mail controls let you set up custom filters, but they leave a lot of room for improvement. For example, you can create "allow" and "block" lists on AOL, but there's no shortcut for uploading an entire address book. You have to type or paste them in one by one. Nor can you autopopulate your allow list with each new person you e-mail. Your best bet may be to simply reshuffle your...
...EARTHLINK Launched in late May, EarthLink's SpamBlocker does everything AOL's mail controls do and more, including several opportunities to retrieve legitimate mail that you might otherwise miss. Once you activate Suspect Mail Blocking, your personal address book becomes your white list (EarthLink's version of AOL's allow list). Rather than block new senders entirely, EarthLink sends them a "challenge response" that will effectively cut off bulk mailers--and probably annoy some friends in the process. You can request daily or weekly reports that list the headers from messages that have been held up, giving you a chance...
...percentage of incoming junk mail before it lands in your In box. The junk is deposited into a separate folder from which you can retrieve messages that shouldn't have been blocked. True to its geeky heritage, Microsoft provides tools for custom filtering that offer users more flexibility than AOL's mail controls, though AOL is busy playing catch...