What happens when the email account you’ve been using for over 10 years suddenly locks you out because you’ve been reported as violating their Terms of Service?

That’s what happened to me after I waged a war against a spammer with an AOL.com email. For years I’ve been getting these spam messages from an AOL email. And for years I’ve reported the account as a spammer. For years, nothing has happened.

Finally, when I was given a real person to talk to and send my complaints to, I thought something might actually happen. Spam is frowned upon by most internet companies and if someone is using their email server to spam swaths of people, they would probably want to know. It doesn’t generally look good for a company when they can’t police their own users.

I kept reporting and for about a week I never heard back from anyone. When I asked the @AOLSupport twitter account for help again, they gave me another email address to try. That got me a response, albeit a lousy one: report it as spam. Gee, thanks.

Nevertheless, I persisted. Theoretically, spammers should not be allowed to flourish on any mass email server. It can ultimately end up causing problems for their own IP addresses and impact all of the users. Thus, it seemed to me that they would at least shut the person down for a bit. Give him a warning. Something. Still, the emails came. Still I persisted.

Then I got this:

It seems AOL reported me as a spammer for forwarding them the spam I was getting. Each email I got from the AOL email I sent to the TOSgeneral@aol.com and abuse@aol.com. So, they found my persistent emails to be spam, but the original source of the emails was not shut down on their own server for spam.

Finding a Public Relations person at AOL has been a real adventure. Nowhere on the internet will you find one. Indeed, I can’t even manage to find an AOL corporate website. Each link I clicked sent me to some Oauth site. Ultimately, @AOLSupport seemed to have a person that could be sent my way. He even promised to accelerate to a supervisor and asked me for my AOL.com email. Ahhh if only…

After two hours, a 20 minute hold time on Google’s customer support line and outreach to several technology reporters and news sites, Google reinstated my email account.

One would think that this would be the close of our journey, instead, I’m starting my war against spam anew. Another call into Google has me in the queue. The question then will be how Google can stop a spammer from another email server and what they do to those that never cease.

Second, will be what I can only imagine to be an exciting conversation with a public relations person at AOL. I can’t wait. Why would AOL protect spammers? What does that say about their brand? When I think of AOL I think of an old man sitting behind a big desktop computer with a huge tube monitor and a tower where the fan never stops running because the CPU is so old it smokes when it gets too dusty.

American Online once existed as a place where people dialing into a phone could access the world wide web. I started using it as a kid in the 1990s. I had a stack of CDs that promised thousands of hours on AOL for free. Each month I had a new AOL account so I could have free internet for years.

Then, the actual internet was started. High speed, always on internet gave students like me the opportunity to seek out huge amounts of information, apply for colleges and read an absurd amount of fan fiction.

Like many, I graduated from the early days of the internet to the fancier, faster, sexier internet. I never thought I would be bothered by AOL again. Boy was I wrong.