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AEGIS: AOL Blocked Email; RSS Is Better Than Email for News

By John S James

Summary: RSS works better than email for receiving or distributing online news, and AEGIS has suggested that its email users switch.

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On June 23, 2007, AEGIS announced that AOL had permanently blocked email from AEGIS to AOL addresses -- because some AEGIS subscribers had clicked AOL's "spam" button instead of unsubscribing properly. AEGIS, one of the oldest and largest databases of AIDS news and other information, has had similar problems many times, but had not yet been able to resolve this one. Therefore it might not be able to notify its AOL subscribers to explain why their email from AEGIS stopped. (Progress has been made as this article went to press.)

AEGIS suggests subscribing to its news feed by RSS instead of email. RSS (Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication) is a format for distributing news online. Today most major news services (and lots of minor ones, including personal blogs) have it available for anyone who wants to subscribe. The main advantage of RSS is that you can subscribe to many news feeds or blogs and get the updates all in one place -- and unlike email, no third party can send you spam. You only get the feeds you subscribe to.

To use RSS, you need to use special software called an RSS reader. AEGIS has instructions for setting up an RSS reader on Windows, Macintosh, or Linux at
http://www.aegis.org/todaysnews/rss.asp.

Or you could bypass all that and use Google's free, Web-based RSS reader with any computer with a recent Web browser (Google recommends Firefox, and notes that a recent Internet Explorer, or Safari on Macintosh, will also work -- all of these are free). You need to have a free Google account (if you have Gmail then you already have one; if you don't have a Google account, it is very easy to set up). For more information see
http://www.google.com/reader.

Note: you can also subscribe to the AIDS Treatment News daily alert service by RSS (see http://www.aidsnews.org/now). We have not publicized this option, as few of our readers have known about RSS. But this method of news distribution has become important. Not only is it immune to third-party spam, but also it can help protect your email addresses from spammers, since you will not need to give out an email address in order to receive news feeds.

RSS has other advantages as well. For example, sometimes you can subscribe to a particular search within a new feed, and receive only those items you are interested in. And if you have a Web site, you can display one or more RSS feeds on that site, automatically updated to show your visitors the most current specialized news. Also, if you have news to distribute, you can easily provide it as an RSS feed, simply by using a blog or other software that already has the technology built in.

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Copyright 2007 by John S. James. We prefer that you link to www.aidsnews.org or a specific article -- no permission required. Otherwise permission is granted for nonprofit use. Please check with us (aidsnews@aidsnews.org) before copying articles more than a year old.