I didn't know Wallace said that. If he did say it, he was right, at least
about that. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. But it has been
reported and discussed elsewhere that AOL does advertising to its users. I
don't think that is too surprising, and it has certainly been discussed
many times on many forums since 1997. So does MSN, as reported by the MSN
anti-spam technical staff at the spam conference held at MIT. The MSN
people said that the biggest complaint they got was that their filters
were blocking the internal spamming.
--Dean
On Wed, 11 Aug 2004, Gordon Fecyk wrote:
My only gripe about AOL (as some may know) is that AOL is not against
spam, but only against spam that doesn't pay it advertising fees to
communicate to its users.
I understand that a lot of us have short term memories[1], so this may come
as a shock.
The only other person I have ever heard this type of comment from was Sanford
Wallace back in his Cyberpromo days. "He accused America Online of getting
Sprint to act, because Cyber Promotion was AOL's competitor for advertising
dollars."
http://www.computerbits.com/archive/1997/0100/surf9701.html
A comment like this doesn't sound much different from old "spamford."
[1] Yet another parallel with the anti-virus industry.