| Company type | Subsidiary of AOL |
|---|---|
| Founded | United States |
| Headquarters | United States |
MailBlocks is an e-mail hosting service company based in the United States, originally established by Phil Goldman in 2002. It was acquired by AOL on August 3, 2004.
Service
Mailblocks offered free challenge-response spam filtering web email service and an IMAP interface as a revenue service.
Patent Troll Controversy
Mailblocks did not invent challenge response to block spam. Instead, they purchased the rights to two patents related to challenge response: patents US6199102 and US6112227. Mailblocks then proceeded to patent troll several other companies before releasing any product of their own. Companies sued included Spam Arrest, DigiPortal, MailFrontier, and Earthlink. A challenge response was a well known technique for fighting personal spam and mailing list spam for years before the two patents were applied for. For example, David Skoll described it in detail in a post to a public forum on November 15, 1996.
References
- "America Online, Inc. Announces Acquisition of Mailblocks, Inc". AOL. 2004-08-03. Retrieved 2008-04-15.
- "Mailblocks review". Archived from the original on 2009-08-06. Retrieved 2009-08-03.
- "MailBlocks sues Earthlink over Anti-Spam Tech - Slashdot". 20 May 2003.
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