AOL Releases Standalone Security App

This should give any knowledgable person a warm fuzzy feeling. As I was reading the news feed on this one today I was so excited I wanted to get some of this. NOT! Here is the article. This group of people actually astound me with their approach. A company which until recently did not offer anything but their proprietary mail server. They have never followed the RFC's with their own mail servers with omitting the abuse and postmaster mail accounts which is a requirement clearly defined.  Yet they think they can dictate to the world how everyone else should run their mail servers. Requiring a reverse look up is absolutely stupid. Most mail servers put a weight associated to reverse lookup and goes against determining what is spam. To do this simply blocks huge numbers of valid emails and honestly they have no easy way for their users to get the problem corrected.

Here is just what any rejected sender has to do to be whitelisted. AOL sender needs to do for a whitelist. AOL® Postmaster Hotline at 1-888-212-5537 I offer this number so everyone can give them a call with how stupid they really are to do this.

However, it seems to me if they had a proper mail server their users could have white list access themself. After all we are certainly familar with third level mail server software. We have to make sure these features are there for our clients. The artilce I refer to in this post has some great comments from other people about AOL and honestly is one of the many you can find world wide. I am focusing this post on email. I know how stupidly they do that! Heaven only knows what will be broken letting these people control your machines security. Given the vast number of unexperienced users they have, I am sure it is better than nothing. Afterall if they were knowledgable would they even consider AOL an option? I think that anyone who hires a company who thinks they can dictate standards to the world, gets exactly what they are paying for. Hopefully their clients will become so isolated on that island called AOL, that they decide rightly to simply leave.