MailBlocks is an
e-mail hosting service
An email hosting service is an Internet hosting service that operates email servers.
Features
Email hosting services usually offer premium email as opposed to advertisement-supported free email or free webmail. Email hosting services thus diff ...
company based in the
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...
, originally established by
Phil Goldman
Phillip York Goldman (July 17, 1964 – December 26, 2003) was an American software engineer and entrepreneur. He was a Macintosh software engineer at Apple Inc., and was best known for co-founding WebTV.
Early life
Phillip York Goldman was born ...
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: patent
US6199102an
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
EarthLink is an American Internet service provider.
It went public on NASDAQ in January 1997. Much of the company's growth was via acquisition; by 2000, ''The New York Times'' described Earthlink as the "second largest Internet service provider ...
.
It is worth noting that 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
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AOL