The kerfuffle broke out after messages sent to AOL users from Telstra BigPond accounts started bouncing on the 17th of April. It took Telstra more than a week to get AOL to lift the ban.
"We cooperate with AOL in fighting spam [and] it has not treated the lifting of the block with the same sense of urgency as Telstra would have liked," a Telstra spokeswoman told ZDNet Australia.
"We think that better communication might have avoided the situation," she added.
Although the black-banning doesn't appear to have been deliberate, Tesltra plans to further investigate the situation.
"We think we were inadvertently blocked," the spokeswoman said. "Our IP addresses were put into an AOL database that was either incorrectly configured or incomplete. We've requested detailed information from AOL [on this]".
Telstra's comments came as AOL on Wednesday touted its spam-fighting prowess, saying it repelled more than 2 billion unsolicited commercial e-mails in a single day this week. The announcement was timed to coincide with the US Federal Trade Commission's first public conference on spam, which started Wednesday.
AOL, along with most Internet service providers and e-mail services, has taken up arms in an effort to stem the waves of junk e-mails inundating the in-boxes in offices and homes.
Earlier this week, AOL formed an alliance with Microsoft and Yahoo with a goal of overhauling how e-mail is created and sent, in an effort to counter how spammers operate. AOL and Microsoft also recently filed suit separately against individuals and companies that are allegedly blasting spam to their members.
AOL said that it reached a milestone when it blocked 2.37 billion pieces of spam e-mail in one day this week--a sign that its filtering technology is apparently improving. In March, it prevented just more than 1 billion junk e-mails a day from reaching its members' in-boxes. The company said it now blocks about 70 percent to 80 percent of all incoming Internet e-mail traffic as spam.
In addition to tightening its filters, AOL said it is blocking such a high volume of e-mail because it is receiving more systematic reports from members about spam and because it is working with other ISPs to target and block specific ranges of IP addresses know to be used by spammers.
When you start using IPs to identify spam you're almost guaranteed to get false positives. If you indiscriminately block every address that has ever been associated with a piece of spam, you will end up blocking almost every every email provider (AOL included) and ISP (AOL again) in the world.
Obviously AOL's system can't differenciate between an email sever belonging to a spammer (used primarily for spam) and one belonging to an ISP (used for personal mail and sometimes _abused_ by spammers) - which is something it needs to be able to do if it has any chance of letting legitmate mail through using this filtering method.