Lounge

This message is for anyone in the community that has students or employees using the AOL service, and especially for those with K-20 student populations. You may have noticed the complaint level among your student population, regarding not receiving Moodle Forum posts and Assignment marking messages, has gone up sharply this year. The reason here is that AOL has decided that it is in their best interest to destroy an important part of what makes the Internet useful (i.e., email).

AOL has decided to charge commercial providers (any ISP) for delivering email to their subscribers. The first phase of this plan is to tighten the already restrictive screws on their spam policy; blacklisting servers that deliver legitimate mail (like messages coming from Moodle) after a certain number of complaints are registered from subscribers. Here is one way this complaint system works against Moodle, and other educational software programs that generate messages.

Imagine that 14 year old Johnny, enrolled in a social studies course designed to help improve test scores (say NCLB or SAT), decides those pesky forum posts and markings that come from his course really don't interest him that much. So, Johnny decides to just click "This is Spam" in his email client, thinking that will take care of his problem. After a certain number of these "complaints" are registered AOL simply blacklists the server IP generating mail coming from Johnny's course. But, it's not that simple! The effect of this action is felt by ALL students in Johnny's school with an AOL address, and all students for EVERY Moodle site on the ISP's server that hosts Johnny's school.

Trying to reason with AOL by suggesting they exempt from blacklisting learning sites and other programs which routinely generate legitimate email has only elicited a hardened response. This protester was told essentially by a senior AOL staff member "tough, were AOL and can do this. If you want your schools and businesses to get mail through on our system (whitelisting) pay us". This is the second phase of their plan to commercialize Internet email. AOL's sledge hammer approach to dealing with email spam is highly punitive against social software that generates messaging as part of its primary function (e.g. LMS, CMS, blog, student help desk responses etc.).

What Can Be Done Dept.
AOL knows their policy will cripple important Internet communications, and will have handed fear mongers and the greedy a victory if they succeed in commercializing email. They can easily exempt legitimate mail servers but refuse to budge on their policy despite a fire storm of protest. This is all about money, and has little to do with protecting subscribers against spam abuse. If you are being affected by AOL's actions, or don't think it is right that AOL should single handedly dictate how Internet email operates, register your protest at DearAOL.com. The Moodle learning community needs to let AOL know, without ambiguity, there will be consequences for their actions. If AOL does not stand down from their plan to commercialize email, and agree to work with legitimate ISP email services insuring Moodle mail goes through, perhaps community members can use their influence with students to dump their AOL service and sign up with a provider that cares about education more than their bottom line. Doing nothing about this now will only embolden Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail and others to follow in AOLs footsteps!