AOL denies responsibility for returned Harvard e-mails

Computerworld - America Online Inc. today denied responsibility for e-mail messages to applicants for early admissions that were bounced back to Harvard College in December.

In published reports yesterday, the Dulles, Va.-based Internet service provider (ISP) was taking the heat for 75 to 100 e-mails to applicants that were returned to Harvard College.

Because of alarms raised by the anthrax-by-mail scare, Harvard decided to send out its early admission notifications by e-mail as well as regular U.S. mail, said Harvard College spokeswoman Andrea Shen.

"You could say the e-mails were a backup to the regular mailings, which we did on the same day," she said. "Although there had been some talk about sending out e-mail notifications even before the anthrax scare."

According to the reports, AOL's servers blocked the e-mails because they determined they were spam, or junk mail.

However, AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said the e-mails that were bounced back had nothing to do with AOL's filtering of spam and were returned for other reasons.

Graham said Harvard sent out about 7,000 e-mail notifications to applicants who had applied for early admissions to the Cambridge, Mass.-based Ivy League school. He said 2,000 to 3,000 of those notices were sent to AOL e-mail accounts, and of those, 75 to 100 were returned to Harvard.

"They were returned for a variety of reasons, including if a person changed his e-mail address, closed his account or his mailbox was full," Graham said. "Having 75 or 100 e-mails returned out of 2,000 or 3,000 is normal."

Shen said Harvard was uncertain about why the e-mails were returned. "I think it's best to talk to AOL about why they bounced back," she said. "It could very well be for a variety of reasons."

But the issue of returned e-mails raises questions about the safety and wisdom of sending important information via bulk e-mail alone.

Peter Christy, an analyst at NetsEdge Research Group in Los Altos, Calif., said there are risks in sending bulk e-mails because there is a higher probability that some will be blocked.

"Spam is an ongoing war, as my in-box certainly shows," he said. "The big and caring ISPs are continually trying to filter out spam, and the spammers are continually working around those filters. So there is no doubt in my mind that from time to time real mail will be blocked, especially a mailing to thousands of recipients such as Harvard's. [Although] I have no understanding whether AOL did or did not block mail inappropriately."

Related stories:

• Start-up gets backing of e-mail pioneers, Nov. 27, 2001



• E-Mail@30, Nov. 12, 2001



• Senators show no taste for spam, April 27, 2001

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