AOL porn warning fiasco.

[druid]

One of my friends who is 83 this year uses Aol, he is not too web-wise and has 'fiddled' about in the chat rooms although he can't make them out, and has started to receive Porn emails, the last one arrived as he was demonstrating his pc to an elderly lady, hearing "you have email" he took the opportunity to demonstrate the email facility and clicked it only to be confronted with a unrepeatable porno message, he was a little upset at this and decided to complain by (unfortunately) replying to the sender, the next email he received was from Aol advising him that he must not send porn and giving him a lecture and first warning! Which of course has rubbed salt into his 'wounds'.
In a way it is kinda funny but the poor old chap was very upset and tried to email a reply to the AOL warning, only to receive a curt message back saying that replies to warning emails are not allowed!
He has now written a 'stiff' letter to Aol.

I myself have never received any porn emails whilst using AOL or for that matter any other isp, but I may have just been lucky. (touch wood)

John

[Derek73]

"stiff" - LOL ;)

[neonboy2k]

Even if AOL sends him a reply, which is unlikely, he will be "blamed" for not blocking them himself. AOL seems to think any spam is a user fault, and if he had blocked it, then he wouldn't have received it.

However, what they seem to forget, is how can you block something you dont know you are going to get :)

Many options, im sure are going to be discussed. But remember the usual 80 year old i know, will not think of setting up a seperate screen name for chatrooms, and another for e-mail and web work.

"AOL, so easy to use, no wonder we can get away with murder"

.neon.

[Logica]

The Porn problem has always been around with AOL, even when AOL started.

When i used to be with AOL the amount of emails (porn) were horrendous, doesn't matter what you did you still got them. Funny really, since i left AOL ...long time ago, i have not received a single porn email.


Tony

[Furby]

Hi Druid :)

the next email he received was from Aol advising him that he must not send porn and giving him a lecture and first warning!

It is very unlikely that this mail came from AOL - you mention that he replied to the sender? I would think that the *sender* sent the mail. AOL will normally scramble your password so that you have to ring their tech support to gain access if there is a problem.

This is one of the negative sides of using AOL although I have not received any porn mail myself (I only go in one specific chat room and that is a private one - you have to know the name of chat to gain access) so that is probably the reason why.

If you enter into aol chatrooms your email is automatically known to all and sundry in there, and there are childish users in any chat room who think it is funny to send such mail. You can get pron mail from using ANY isp if someone finds your mail and decides to send it, but it is unfortunate that with AOL it is readily available to other members.

:rolleyes:

I would suggest that he sends a copy of both mails with a complaint directly to AOL and see what happens. To do this type TOS (short for terms of service) into the keyword bar and click on *notify AOL* at the bottom right of the box that appears. Hope this helps :)

[Washac]

I thought AOL advertised themselves as the family ISP where you see and get what you want your family to see.

Seems this is not true.

[druid]

Hi Sarah,
Glad to see that you are still in the forums, (there has been talk you know, Lol) thanks for the advice about TOS and notify, I will pass this on to him, to be fair my comments were based on what he told me but at 83 he gets a little muddled with the net and Aol sometimes.

Washac,
I don't think that porn is unique to Aol and to be fair it can happen with any ISP, but as Sarah says as the spammers only have to add @aol.com to your screen name it is wise not use your normal screen name if you frequent chat rooms.

I really do think that it is down to parents to take responsibility to protect their children from porn on the net, after all everyone knows it is there! Some films on TV are way over the top with extreme violence, bad language and 'filth' and surely parents monitor their children's viewing habits.
As I have said before I have never received any porn emails or even general spam on my Aol account and whilst I am glad of this I don't think it is the end of the world and if I did I would just delete them,
I will say though that I have received such mail whilst connected to another ISP, (yes contrary to opinion you can get porn emails via other isp's too!) I posted the story because in a way it was quite amusing and the 'auld' chap did see the funny side of it and we had a good laugh!

John.

[Washac]

Sorry I do not agree that Porn mail is not unique to AOL, I have had several ISP's over the years and have never ever received porn mail. My daughter uses chatrooms and still no porn mail.

AOL can and should do something about it..................

The AOL forum here is the only forum I have read about this in.


Sorry to disagree but it is only my personal expierence.

[mansunite]

A good way of eliminating a lot of , if not all, porn emails is by using a designated screen name for the chatrooms as that is where the spammers pick up all their email addresses. Then log into your Master account (the one you originally signed up to AOL with) and change the email controls of your chatroom screen name to 'Never accept email'. Ta-da! That's what I've done and it works perfectly. Hope that helps.

[druid]

**Sorry to disagree but it is only my personal expierence.**

No need to be sorry washy, the forums are here to discuss things, as I said in my previous message though I have not received porn mail through Aol though I have via another isp, my daughter has received porn emails via hotmail though.

John.

[bigwapsite]

I use AOL, so does my wife and 8yrs old daughter, despite aol saying its family safe, it does cut nearly all ties to the internet for children.
So I let my daughter use my screen name, and in the process I recieved a porn email and my daughter looked at it:confused: :mad:
As you can imagine I was not pleased so a friend of mine came round and found a email address of aol's that you can send these emails to, I still have not had a reply from aol that was 4 months ago, and then for the 3 months after that I still recieved these emails.
It stopped when I changed my profile I took it off, so I can only presume they get the emails from your profile that is availble to any one on aol.

Mark
Just my thaughts!

[Furby]

exactly, I have said this before, NEVER do your AOL profile! If you use a chatroom name and block email there, and don't have a profile, you lessen the chances considerably of receiving porn mail ;)

Yes, it is one of the flaws of AOL, but no ISP is perfect. I think the benefits of AOL far outweigh the drawbacks. Being scrupulous and vigilante should ensure happy surfing :)

I have never had any pron mail, but my son has (from idiots in a chat room) and thankfully the problem stopped when we changed his screename. The master screename cannot be changed so this is the ideal one to use for chat and ban all mail and private messaging in :)

Most of this porn mail is sent by the younger members of AOL BTW - the same line who like to send people viruses.

[neonboy2k]

As i said before, there are many possibilities to stop receiving Pr0n email from spammers on AOL. However most ISPs do have a department albeit one or two people who stop this thing from happening.

AOL seems to not care about the spammers, they do NOT need to change their screen-name system, but simply ban/kick spammers. Unfortunately they see this as a waste of time and money, and due to the small number of complaints due to spam, they consider it as a low priority matter. Even though making AOL 7 even worse than 5/6 seems to be high priority :) ... oh well....

.neon.