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City boxed into anti-spam trap
By DAVE GUSSOW ST. PETERSBURG -- America Online's anti-spam crusade has claimed a big victim: the city of St. Petersburg. The largest online service has blocked messages from the city government to AOL subscribers for the last week, incorrectly identifying the city as a sender of junk e-mail. "AOL is aware of the issue," Muslim Gadiwalla, the city's chief information officer, said Wednesday. "I'm not sure they consider it a problem." But the city and its Internet service provider, Bright House Networks, did. It took them a week to figure out the problem and come up with a way around it, which they hope to have in place this week. AOL, MSN, Earthlink and other service providers have vowed to crack down on spam, the electronic junk mail that's flooding in-boxes at an increasing rate, taxing their systems and their subscribers' patience. According to Brightmail, which makes spam filters for corporations, spam has increased to 45 percent of the e-mail it sees, up from 16 percent in January 2002. AOL has been particularly active in the fight recently, filing suit against spammers and adding filters to block the messages. According to Gadiwalla, the problem stemmed from AOL somehow identifying the city's Internet protocol address as a residential one, not commercial. Because AOL and most other service providers don't allow residential subscribers to run mail servers, heavy volumes of mail coming from such an address can be interpreted as a sign that a spammer is at work. That apparently triggered the block. AOL subscribers could send the city e-mail, but city staff could not send anything to them. E-mail notifications and inquiries to city agencies have gone unanswered for days. The city could not estimate how many people might have been affected by the block. Gadiwalla said some staff phoned or faxed responses instead. "It took time to identify what was going on and what the issues were," said Dave Ross, general manager for Bright House online services, which worked with the city on the fix. Ross says he's aware of individuals who have been blocked by providers' anti-spam filters previously, but never an entity as big as a city government. AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said the service was trying to get in touch with city officials to investigate, and hoped to resolve the issue soon. "We're blocking up to 1.9-billion spam e-mails every day," Graham said. "The vast majority are spam, but sometimes inadvertent things happen that we seek to resolve very quickly with people who are blocked and shouldn't have been blocked." -- Information from Times files was used in this report. Dave Gussow can be reached at gussow@sptimes.com
or (727) 445-4228.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111 
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From the Times Business report
From the AP
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