On AOL? You Don't Need No Steenking Free Speech
AOL charged with blocking opponents' e-mail | CNET News.com:
update America Online on Wednesday apparently began blocking e-mail on its servers containing the Web address of a petition against the company's upcoming certified-mail program, an issue the company called a "glitch."
The Internet service provider, which has roughly 20 million subscribers in the United States, began bouncing e-mail communications with the URL "Dearaol.com" sometime late Wednesday and continuing through Thursday.
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.
"We discovered the issue early this morning, and our postmaster and mail operations team started working to identify this software glitch," he said.