A coalition fighting AOL's paid E-mail plans says the company has been blocking the organization's own E-missives to supporters. AOL says the problems were due to a technical glitch.

WASHINGTON (By Antone Gonsalves, TechWeb) April 24, 2006 —

The DearAOL.com Coalition, which is circulating online petitions to gather signatures for an open letter to AOL, said emails with the link www.DearAOL.com were bounced back to the sender with a message saying, "failed permanently."

AOL, a subsidiary of Time Warner Inc., denied it was blocking email, blaming the snafu on a "technical glitch."

"A technical glitch arose on AOL late yesterday (Wednesday) affecting a range of different Web links in emails," AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said in an emailed statement. "We discovered the issue early this morning. Our postmaster and mail operations teams started working to identify this software glitch at that time, and it has already been fixed."

AOL said messages that included the coalition's link were being delivered normally on Thursday, as well as all other email. The DearAOL Coalition confirmed that messages were no longer getting blocked.

The coalition, comprised mostly of nonprofit groups, is against AOL's plans to launch a guaranteed email service targeted primarily at organizations that send bulk email. The paid service would ensure that AOL subscribers would receive the messages and their attachments and links, provided they had agreed to in advance. AOL partner Goodmail Systems Inc. would run the certified email service, expected to launch this month.

AOL is offering a similar service for nonprofits, but the coalition says the free offering doesn't go far enough to match the paid service, which is meant to separate legitimate commercial email from spam.

The group on Thursday said the bounced-back messages proved their point in objecting to the paid service, which they claim would give Internet service providers too much control over the delivery of email on the public Web.

"Left to their own devices, AOL will always put its own self interest ahead of the public interest in a free and open Internet,” Timothy Karr, campaign director of Free Press, said in a statement, which also accused AOL of trying to censor its critics.

Free Press, a national group working on Internet policy issues, is a member of the coalition, along with political action committee MoveOn.org, Gun Owners of America, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Association of Cancer Online Resources, the Humane Society, and the AFL-CIO.

Wes Boyd, co-founder of MoveOn.org, was one of the people who reported having messages bounced back.

“I tried to email my brother-in-law about DearAOL.com and AOL sent me a response as if he had disappeared,” Boyd said in the coalition statement. “But when I sent him an email without the DearAOL.com link, it went right through.”

Members of the DearAOL.com Coalition claim to represent about 15 million people. The group, according to organizers, has grown since last month to 600 member organizations from the original 50. More than 350,000 Internet users have signed letters to AOL opposing its pay-to-send plans, the group says.