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Dealing with False AOL Spam Reports?
aohell-guy asks: "I handle the mail servers for a business that has 20% of our members using AOL. We regularly send out email that our members have agreed to receive. In AOL 8.0, it was possible to click a single message and report it as spam. You would be prompted to confirm the spam report, although no details explaining what happens with the report are given to the user. Through AOL's Postmaster site, it is possible to get in on the spam 'Feedback Loop,' where AOL will send you the spam reports it receives for mail sent from your servers. When you receive a report, you are supposed to immediately cease the sending of email to that AOL address. The only problem is, we have found that most of the time the AOL users are reporting our email as spam on accident! These complaints can negatively impact your ability to send email to AOL members. How are you handling the false reports?"
"In version 9.0, AOL made two incredibly stupid mistakes which make false positive spam reports skyrocket. First is they now allow their users to select multiple messages at once and report them all as spam. Second, when you hit the spam report button (which is located DIRECTLY next to the delete button), it IMMEDIATELY files the spam report -- there is no confirmation required. Sure, the AOL user can see they made a mistake and move your email back out of their spam folder...but the report is still filed against your server. Rack up enough of these reports, and you will not be able to send mail to AOL. We have had plenty of complaints come in, and we delete their accounts as they do -- except with our paying members. We ask them if they really want to cancel? In ALL cases but one, we have received replies stating it was an accident.
We have spoken to people within AOL that deal with the mail. (Amazingly, it is not too hard to speak with them if you are a business sending email to AOL users.) The ones we've spoken to are not happy with these changes in AOL 9.0, and admit they result in many false positives.
If you are sending a lot of email to AOL users, you will want to get in on their feedback loop ASAP, and also look into getting on AOL's 'whitelist,' which ensures that your mail will not be silently filtered into the bit bucket, as long as you keep your mail bounces and spam reports (ahem!) at a low level."
We have spoken to people within AOL that deal with the mail. (Amazingly, it is not too hard to speak with them if you are a business sending email to AOL users.) The ones we've spoken to are not happy with these changes in AOL 9.0, and admit they result in many false positives.
If you are sending a lot of email to AOL users, you will want to get in on their feedback loop ASAP, and also look into getting on AOL's 'whitelist,' which ensures that your mail will not be silently filtered into the bit bucket, as long as you keep your mail bounces and spam reports (ahem!) at a low level."
Who would've thought that possible.
Unfortunately you're dealing with AOL, a company that has always been a few cents short of a dollar. There's probably not much you can do. Sorry this isn't helpful, but it's not your fault they placed the Junk button so close to the delete button.
Homestarrunner.net -- It's Dot Com!
.... aviod AOL altogether. I know that's not helpful, but our company simply gives our users dial-up accounts to dial into the building. Seems to circumvent the situation. If your company can afford it, setting up your own private "ISP" is the way to go.
-Valiss
My emails get routed to null at aol as well. Really sucks when trying to contact a client who uses AOL. Get the owner of the box (root access, some stupid AOL rule) to call the AOL Postmaster, stay on hold a bit, and you can get it all sorted out.
I think you've done all you can. I would even go so far as to say that you've answered your own question. Call AOL, make sure they know you're legit, and wait for the next version of AOL to fix what turned out to be a bad design choice. In the meantime, maybe add a note to one of your mailings suggesting that they make sure to be careful about that. It's not like you can do anything else.
DoggI work in a tech support environment dealing with end users, many using AOL. The e-mails we sent out come from the same or a similar address, and all have a similar format such as opening and closing, AOL seems to 'randomly' block them. I know it's really not random, but trying to figure it out is next to impossible.
When I hear incredibly stupid mistake about AOL, it's like hearing the word patch associated with M$.
Seriously a spam report is the least of AOL's problem. As soon as the rest of the internet noobs figure out how to use the internet via a regular ISP, AOL is history.
Just put "Enlarge your Member" in the subject line. It NEVER gets marked as spam in my experience. I sell about 200 pounds of snake oil a day to AOL users.
I work for an internet hosting provider and we get an incredible number of AOL spam complaints daily.
We manually file almost all of them as spam.
We haven't automated it yet because getting an even more excessive number of them at once might indicate an owned server or something.
Other than that, they are almost completely worthless. 90% of them (or more) come to us because people forward mail for their domains to AOL.
"The only problem is, we have found that most of the time the AOL users are reporting our email as spam on accident!"
Sure... on "accident."
Seriously - I'm not sure what business you're in, but do your clients really need to be using AOL? Could be worse, I guess. It could be Netzero. Still, I have a few clients that are AOL customers, and the host of problems that they've faced has been enough to convince them to switch.
Connections, mail problems, whatever.
Unfortunately there is not much you can do except listen to them. Even if you think someone reported you on accident, drop them from the list. If they complain later, simply supply them with a copy of the e-mail that you were sent by AOL saying that you were reported by them as SPAM. This is an annoying solution, but you don't want to get added to AOL's spam list. It is VERY difficult to get taken off once you have been put on. You can even spin it in a positive light if you get complaints from users asking why they no longer get e-mail from you. Say that you are aggressively opposed to spam, and stop sending mail at the first sign that your letters are unwanted.
The only other thing I could think of is maybe put a note in the messages of your AOL users asking them to contact AOL and fix their policy. The chances of this working are beyond slim, but it will make it appear to your users that you are trying to serve them the best that you can.
You seem to be confused, you're sending mail that is prompting users to click on the "This is Spam!" button even though your readers tell you they want to hear from you.
It might work better if you provided useful content "above the fold" of every message you send, then follow it with "Today's content was sponsored by...". If you're sending a pure ad in e-mail, it smells like Spam and users are going to turn it in...
I used to work for a (legit) marketing firm, and had this same issue with AOL. They were technologically savvy enough thought, and had enough latitude with the membership services, that we set up aliased email accounts on our own servers for our subscribers. This dramatically cut down on our false-positives after we asked filters to be set up by our clients to get them into the right place to begin with (i.e., different folder).
Your mileage may very, and not everyone has the option to ask that kind of technical activity of their clients, so we lucked out. Might want to give it a try though.
Any spoon would be too big.
Take the hint and unsubscribe them from the newsletter/mailing that they "opted" to receive. It is not too hard.
I submitted a support request to SF about it, and they said (rightfully) that it is AOL's problem.
-- http://www.swcp.com/~hudson/
I find AOL to be rather laughable now.
AOL, as crappy as their business is, is rather large. You think you're the only one dealing with this problem? Unlikely.
If worst comes to worst, you just might not have to support AOL e-mails.
---
Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
A professor of mine had a similar situation with some class mailings that he did. Some odd configuration of his email server had caused AOL to blacklist him - period.
no.
I work for an independt-regional isp, and often have to serve as the conduit for users who cannot e-mail AOL. Quite simply, I have to spend 20-30min each time with customer support to have our ip addresses "removed" from their abuse list. If there IS a better solution, I have not found it yet!
At some point in my history... I was using pine, and sending mail. I set name using chfn "first I last", though my memory could be foggy and it could have been "first I. last". This wasn't a problem for any mail server except for AOL... for some reason it wouldn't parse correctly and try to send mail to "first I@domain.com"
Dispite honest efforts trying to get a hold of the mail staff, by my self and my isp... at no point was it possible to actually report the problem to anyone.
The final solution was just changing my name to "first last"... as it was important at the time to actually to get proper replies from people at AOL for some reason.
While not directly related to story... it just goes to show you that trying to actually communicate with anyone with in the AOL realm is practicaly impossible, and you should just give up before you start. The best you can do is communicate to people that AOL has *this* problem and your only resolve is to either do things diffrently, or switch services.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Shouldn't AOL be the people policing the spam ? The last people qualified to distinguish between a piece of spam from a normal piece of email are AOL users. For god's sake, how do you think the MyDoom virus got spread ? people not knowing how to properly identify illegitmate email. You would think AOL be able to identify the fact that their users are at the bottom of the food chain when it comes to online aptitude.
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
I run a bunch of Mailman mailing lists. One time, one of the people on this mailing list false SpamCop-ed one of the monthly mailing list reminders, which caused my ISP to complain to me. I kicked him off the mailing list and told him he couldn't come back until he'd convinced my ISP that the spam report was in error. I don't think he ever did come back on, but fortunately the ISP didn't kick me off - perhaps it's giving RoadRunner too much credit, but even *they* must realize the huge false positive rate from SpamCop.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Actually, I'm not sure I ever received any spam reports against my server. But it was terrible getting whitelisted. They directed me to call a certain number that didn't work 1/2 the time, and I had to wait on hold for at least 30 minutes.
All to tell them that my server wasn't blocked. They told me it wasn't. I told them that was the error I was receiving. They told me my server wasn't on the list.
Eventually I mentioned that my server was in Rackshacks datacenter. Apparently they had banned a whole range of IP addresses, and their utilities didn't show if an IP were in that list.
So after a very frustrating conversation, they whitelisted me. Any way, I don't know how this helps you, but it feels good to vent!
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
We have an IT meeting soon where I will be leading a discussion about on-line communications. I will be suggesting that we don't accept all email addresses from Hotmail (so many bounce with user unknown or over quota) and "hanmail" (incoming messages get tagged as spam because of the HTML that the service wraps user messages in), and that we start recording IM accounts as a backup communications option. I'm not saying we refuse emails from Hotmail accounts, I'm just saying that when you tell us your address, we won't accept a Hotmail address.
if ($emailaddress =~ /aol.com/i) {
&RejectAddress();
}
# Erik
My mom had her account frozen because of a similar mistake. I've been trying to get her to stop using AOL for years, but she was too afraid it'd be too complex. This was finally the straw that broke the camel's back. Now she uses Juno and I provided her (and my whole family) e-mail addresses through my account with Lunarpages in case she doesn't like Juno. The best part is, for some reason, attachments are now more intuitive to use for her, so I don't get a phone call 3 times a week as she tries to view the picture of her granddaughter. All at half the price.
argh...that's only two words, or four depending how you view it
wait... isn't that 2 words? or four, i guess, if you count the letters...
Go on, be afraid. Encourage the terrorists
Most likely they signed up for the newsletter by accident and now they don't want it anymore.
When I get newseletters that claim I signed up for them, the first things I utterly avoid are reading them and following any links or instructions in them.
So, just stop sending email to people who obviously don't want it anymore; consider the spam report as unsubscribe requests.
First your message should say "This message is part of your Whatever.com subscription, which you signed up for on mm/dd/yyyy." If you have anything else than this as the first line of your message, you're asking for it.
But this is nothing. I run a mail server and I set up accounts which auto forward to AOL accounts. The users would spread their address everywhere, and when spammers would spam it, it would forward to AOL and they'd mark it as junk, and AOL would block ME since *I* sent it to them - makes no sense. I stopped forwarding to AOL (or to anyone, really.) POP or Nothing.
# Erik
You recipients, and I, just add the senders of emails that they don't the fuck want to their mark-as-spam list.
... yup, spam, spammer.
Your users think you emails are shit, and they can't be bothered the - probably - ordeal of unsubscribing. De-list those who don't want your
Thanks for not using the trite "read on" phrase!
The only problem is, we have found that most of the time the AOL users are reporting our email as spam on accident!
My personal opinion is that since AOL caters to the lowest element, that's what their users tend to be. If you're in a situation where you have to send business emails to someone using an AOL address, perhaps you should try to persuade them to get a yahoo address as well.
Unless you're willing/able to hire someone to work full time on dealing with the idiots who requested your emails and them reported them as spam, I don't see an end to your problems.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
luck you didn't post it or mention it's name or AOL black lists will be the last of your problem.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
AOL has blocked a huge portion of I.P addresses in Australia like 61.8.0.0 has been blocked off or something insane like that so AOL is no concern of mine if our clients have to contact AOL users we suggest they try hotmail or yahoo mail for those clients as AOL refuses to remove the ban. Now that's outrageous
RTFPost!!!!
We have had plenty of complaints come in, and we delete their accounts as they do -- except with our paying members. We ask them if they really want to cancel? In ALL cases but one, we have received replies stating it was an accident.
Or are you using AOL 9.0 and accidentally clicked the submit button before reading the full text of the post?
If you'd read the article you'd see that they know it was accidental (these were paying customers), and when they tried to confim the email, the users themselves claimed it was an accident.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
"on accident" is nonsense. that's like "setting" on the bed. try "by accident."
I don't know where to begin...
First and foremost, don't assume they are reporting your turdlets as spam "by accident". Perhaps they really don't want your emails after all. If they really want to hear from you they'll be signing up again. You're SOL as far as I can tell. The only responsible thing to do is stop sending them to anyone who has complained. Whether on purpose or by accident. Unless you're really spamming, in which case you're the scum of the earth and will keep on sending unwanted email regardless of whether or not the recipient wants it, but I'm not making that accusation.
Secondly, if you're a business then why do you refer to your email recipients as "members"? Are they in some sort of "affiliate" program you manage? I really don't understand this. No real business refers to their cusomers as "members". Well, I guess health clubs, country clubs and other clubs do... And shady operations that want to spin what they're doing as "not spam".
So stop sending the emails and put in place a method where people who really want to receive your email re-sign up with you. Then email them once and ask them to respond affirmatively if they really want to receive email from you. I's called "confirmed opt-in". Once you have that affirmative acceptance in hand you should be able to use it to positively refute any aaccusation by AOL that you are sending unwanted, unsolicited email.
We have 125,000 AOL users (including 3,000 Compuserve) who are marked in our DB as hold due to being blocked by AOL mail servers. These are opt-in lists for product updates and news letters. People have to jump through hoops just to get on to the list in the first place. It's not worth the hassle to us. If this makes a large number of AOL customers unhappy, then they should change ISP. We're providing a service, but the goodwill it garners is only worth so much when the issues of dealing with AOL become too expensive. People like our products and seem to come back whether or not they get the mailing list stuff from us that they've requested. We've been through the process of getting unblocked twice, but it seems to take up a month. The third time we were blocked we said fuckit (or words to that affect).
Now lets talk about Yahoo. They seem to have faulty logic somewhere. I have a Yahoo account and find a lot of false-positives. As far as our mailing list goes, on one occasion we ended up being filtered to their bulk folder... which can be a lot harder to notice than being completely blocked.
How about letting the recipients of your emails know that they have subscribed to this. If need be put this line right at the top of hte email.. Alternatively add this to the subject.. something along the lines of :
[{companyname} subscribed newsletter]
Try to make it obvious for them, and similarly for the AOL "minder" who checks them.
www.aimprogz.net
Troll. He said he handles the mail servers for a business. He didn't say mailing was the business. Almost every big business has mail servers for many reasons.
---
Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
When I realized over a year ago that spam was starting to be a huge headache for me, I started saving all my spam and good mail to separate directories, in preparation for using a Bayesian filter. At that time I was getting 20 per day, now I get 350, of which a few make it to my inbox. Anyway, I read Paul Graham's plan for spam and decided to write my own filter, and built in a feature where it would check my classification. Lo and behold, about 5% of the mail I classified was identified by my filter as being incorrectly classified. The filter was correct in almost all cases - I was either misinterpreting the emails or ending up saving them to the wrong directories after correctly categorizing them. Now, whenever someone wants to use my filter, I first require them to classify by hand all their mail for a few weeks. Once they run my program they are amazed - they can't believe they made so many mistakes, and they are instant believers in the power of Bayesian filters. My point is that in implementing these spam reports, the ISPs MUST take human error into account, and only penalize mass-senders if over (roughly) 5% of a given sender's recipients complains.
Simple solution, don't send email to AOL users unless it's critical. Sure, they may have 'agreed' to recive it, but do they really need your newsletter or whatever? My guess is that they don't.
If you have a web service, set things up so that users are notified about messages when they log on. If they are not AOL users, then also mail them.
Simple solution. Honestly I'd much prefer if all of the mail in my mailbox was from individuals who actualy wanted to say something to me personaly.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
On the other hand, you might want to ignore AOL users as clueless and so, who cares about them.
However, if you are selling something, these are just the suckers you might want.
what to do, what to do...
Quit sending AOL accounts email. Tell them that the daily/weekly/monthly newsletter is on the web site, they want to read it, vist the site.
Simple, no?
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Thought about faxing or snail mailing them instead?
We played dungeons and dragons for 3 hours.....then i was slain by an elf
I had a problem with a customer who wanted all of his email to be forwarded to his AOL account and then repeatedly marked it all as spam without notifying us that there was a problem.
:)
The result: our server was blocked as a spam relay.
AOL helped correct this quickly, but when I emailed the customer to let him know what happened he flagged my emails as spam and our servers were blocked again!
Our customer wasn't returning calls so I disabled his account. After that he was very willing to contact me to speak about things
I run a small (~200 user) mailing list for my homeowner's association, and I've been fighting the AOL Spam filters for years. From what I can tell, the process of notifying AOL that your email is indeed something that users have signed up for and WANT is near impossible. I'm almost to the point of telling the HOA that we can't accept AOL accounts any more, as nothing gets through. I've also had the same experience with Time Warner Roadrunner, EarthLink and others as well... What I find MOST disturbing is that on AOL the user NEVER receives the email, nor a notification that something was rejected. Ignorance is bliss as far as AOL is concerned, and they like keeping their users in the dark.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I get plenty of emails that I have never agreed to receive, regardless of what the company says. Could it be that if they are reporting it as spam that they don't want your emails? It could be that the users are stupid, but in this day and age, given our spam problems, telling the company you don't want spam seems to only give a verification that you use that email address (thus you get more spam). So it could be that they are taking the easy route. They let some filter catch it.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
I have told several users that AOL takes actions that are unique to AOL which suggest they consider themselves to be an AOL Service Provider (ASP) and is *NOT* an ISP. As such, the user needs to subscribe to something that more closely fits the defination of an ISP.
Some key areas that AOL differs from an ISP include:
- an ISP will look up in whois a technical contact to send a SPAM report to
- AOL ignores the whois database and requires the user to subscribe to AOL's "postmaster" site
- ISPs will take reports that go to either postmaster@ISP or abuse@ISP seriously
- AOL ignores email to postmaster@aol.com and abuse@aol.com in favor of a non-standard tosemail1
- If an ISP continues to be issuing SPAM, they will usually be willing to discuss the problem by phone with the reciever of the SPAM
- AOL will only discuss issues with the reciever of SPAM if they have an AOL screen name
- ISPs consider it a problem if they are sending SPAM just as much as it is a problem if they are recieving SPAM
- AOL does not consider it their problem when they issue SPAM but do complain that recieving SPAM is costing them alot of money
- ISPs will usually require account holders to provide credit card information or some other form of information making them aware of who you are and that they haven't already had problems with you
- AOL prides itself on providing throw away accounts with lot of free hours and no longer require a credit card
The bottom line is that AOL is a safe haven for SPAM to be issued from but AOL is quick to complain when they are getting the same crap that they dish out to the Internet. If AOL 9.0 makes it easier for AOL to blackhole itself then more power to them. Just warn everyone of the blackhole that AOL has decided to put itself into rather than trying to slow down the progress of the blackhole by "supporting" an organization that considers itself above being supported.
Of course, you must save the user's most recent record of agreeing to receive email from you and submit that to AOL to refute their report.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
As a matter of fact AOL handles this quite reasonably. The secret is reverse resolution.
I am postmaster and in the IT security department of a fortune 150 Office Supply company. We started to experience this problem, and contacted AOL. We were added to the whitelist, set up the feedback loop yet we kept getting blacklisted. Spoke with a tech who told us to call the corporate phone number and speak with the "Spam Czar" whose name I cannot recall and cannot locate via google.
After speaking with him we discovered we were still getting blacklisted after around five complaints, when we send thousands of order confirmations to AOL addresses a day. They tracked down the problem, and it was that one of our mail servers did not reverse resolve. We fixed this, and bam, we now take nearly a hundred complaints to be blacklisted.
(You wouldn't believe how many people flag an order confirmation as spam. You also wouldn't believe how many corporate employees forward there email to AOL and flag it as spam, when they forwarded the spam to themselves!)
It was quite embaressing that we were not reverse resolving the host that sends order confirmations. We do send some opt-in marketing, but it originates from a different server.
(Our marketing you opt into while ordering, don't flame me, we do not purchase lists!)
It's one thing to run aggressive spam reporting filters. It's another to have no procedure that can get you out of the doghouse. My father and I run a very very small commercial service for monitoring the rank of various books at Amazon that's sold to authors. They pay for the service. It's double opt-in. We keep records of each sign-up and each opt-in confirmation, as well as payment records.
AOL banned our URL but not our email. The error said the URL in our messages couldn't be sent to AOL addresses. We contacted our three (yes, just three) AOL subscribers and asked them to try to use AOL's tools to make sure our email went through, but they didn't have any options that helped.
I contacted AOL, spoke to a guy who believed what I had to say, and I sent email including a variety of details to a Yahoo (ironic) address that they obvious use for disposable purposes and change from time to time. No response. A week later, I email there again as a follow-up. No response.
So what are we to do? Convince AOL subscribers to switch to another ISP? Nope.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
I work for a colo/hosting outfit. I also read the "abuse@*" address here. I found out about this system at AOL back in November, and spent a few weeks working my way through the postmaster group at AOL. I finally did get a really clued guy, who did a lot to help out... however, the system is so completely flawed that there isn't much that can be done to fix it.
Easily 98% of their reported "spams" are false positives. I've collected the 10,000 or so rejected mails and They break down like this:
40% are auto-mails from some website notification system
(example: one of our clients is an "aprtment finding service" that you sign up and I assume pay for. It notifies you if an apartment that meets your needs becomes available, via email.)
30% are mailing list traffic
10% are confirmation emails for ecommerce purchases!
10% are *personal correspondence!*
8% are actual spam, but being legitimately forwarded to an AOL address via a domain hosted by us, but whose user has configured it to forward to an AOL address.
2% is who knows what.
To have a system that fundamentally flawed is amazing. I don't use AOL... in fact I've never even seen what it looks like, so I don't know if this is *user* generated or auto-generated, but I do know it just doesn't work.
I block ALL mail that is going to/from AOL addresses. Makes things so much simpler to deal with. (It helps a lot when the IQ of a user is > age of user....)
My project Slashster, being a Friendster clone per se, sends out email recommendations from people on the site to others inviting them to join the site.
I found with Yahoo and Hotmail, that typically altering the email message not to include any sort of links (other than possibly slashster.com without the http://), typically allows the message to go through the filter. After all, most spam messages include some kind of tracking url in order to show where they came from. Right?
Not so with AOL. Pretty much any sort of attempt I do of sending an email through it have it flag up as spam. I suppose what happened was that someone hit the spam button for my site, and it was blacklisted.
It is possible to get whitelisted though. But you have to contact AOL in order to be part of the whitelist. You also need to fill out an application saying how many emails you plan on sending out a day, whatnot.
What kind of crap is this? I mean, they don't actually expect us to fill out an application for EVERY ISP out there that wants to lower spam. Ugh. Do I have to honestly write Hotmail, Yahoo, Earthlink, AOL, Adelphia, Comcast, and every other ISP / email provider out there to say "Hey, I'm not spam. Don't block me." or is there a better way? I doubt there's anything better.
It gets on my nerves, especially considering that I've started receiving mass emails from people who have invited me to Orkut. I haven't even joined that site yet, and of course, any sort of message from them does *NOT* show up as spam... Figures.
Note: I know some of you saying that sending Social Networking emails would be considered spam. I'm not sure if it could, after all, it's not the same email sent out to thousands of people. It's rather, one person sending another person a message, through my server. I know some of you will disagree, but eh.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I spoke with the head of AOL's security/IT system. Let me tell you they analyze EVERY e-mail that goes through their system. They look at all the popular RBLs and if you use *certain* politically-incorrect words in your e-mails, they flag the messages for further review. I am unaware of any system on the planet that is more thorough (or privacy-invading) than AOL. Don't let them fool you - their system is the focal point, probably, for a huge amount of intelligence-gathering efforts.
If a large amount of your mailings are "mistaken" as spam, they probably are spam.
It's not like AOL will be around for long...
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
I have had my mail servers IPs blocked 4 times by AOL. Every time, it was because some of our franchisees or other legitimate business contacts have falsely reported our mail as spam.
The best thing you can do is to call the postmaster number, remain calm, and be patient with the person on the other end. Also, send out reminders to your members or whatever that if they report your legit mailings as spam, they will be missing out on important announcements etc.
It is important to remember that you are dealing with AOL and AOL members, so it is necessary to use 1-2 syllable words and speak slowly, often repeating complex concepts like 'Delete' vs. 'Report Spam'. Given time, the problem eases up a bit, but will never go away as long as AOL has this system in place.
bash: rtfm: command not found
The school I'm going to, University of Florida has been having it's headaches with spam for this same reason. It sends out a weekly newsletter about what is going on in the university, important dates, events, that kind of thing. It's sent out to everyone's university appointed email address (foobar@ufl.edu) but people can then have that forwarded to their AOL address.
Now some people don't like this weekly thing (which is somewhat important so students get needed information, but whatever. When you're a student here, you get the email.), and so they mark it as spam when they get it, or else they do the accidental spam report thing. AOL then sees all these "spam" mail coming from ufl.edu addresses, and promptly blocks ALL email from any ufl.edu address. This has happened 3 times now, and each time the university system adminstrator has had to go through a ton of hoops to get it back in the clear. Meanwhile everyone using an AOL account doesn't get teacher emails, club announcements that they signed up for, and any sort of personal mail that someone sends from their ufl.edu account.
Hopefully AOL will get it's act together. In the meantime they're trying to get people to stop having their mail forwarded to AOL accounts, but of course even college educated people want to use AOL, for whatever god forsaken reason.
Call ALL at 703-265-4670 and ask them to remove you from the black list.
Years ago, I realized how AOL works: it walks around with a gun in each hand. Each gun points at one of its own feet. Then, at random intervals, it pulls one or both triggers. AOL shooting it in the foot isn't news; AOL managing not to shoot itself in the foot would be news indeed.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Scenarios:
1) They didn't mean to file you as spam, but they get so much spam anyway that they are deleting it - in otherwords, they are sick of stuff they don't care about
2) They agree that your mail IS solicited, but maybe they are sick of getting it and dont' want it anymore but don't know how to unsubscribe? - solution if they don't want it, its spam, leave them alone
3) They really do think it is spam but when confronted, they realize that it IS solicited (see #2)
4) They never flag your mail as spam.
Seems like #4 is the only category that you should keep sending to?
However, #4 could be sub-categorized:
4a) they don't know how to flag as spam
4b) they don't check that mail anymore
4c) they really want your mails because they are lonely.
If it is 4a, then they probably don't know how to click your links to come buy your product
If it is 4b, then they will never read the mail to click the link to buy your product
If it is 4c), then go for it... they are your gold customer.
All this leads to my assertion that you should send mail to as small of an audience as necessary. For instance, your boss needs to have a general idea of what you are doing from day to day and that you are meeting deliverables. However, do you CC your boss on EVERYTHING you mail? Probably not.... so why would you do the same for your customers?
It would probably be more effective to collect the specific stats around your buyers habits and target next sales on that.... providing they don't object TOO much to that. an email from companies like:
"Hey, I see you bought X 3 months ago and we are now selling X.2 for $Y."
is much better than
"Hey, want some viagra for your small, floppy wang?"
VERY, VERY few online companies should know anything about my wang and I can therefore rule those mails out as spam very quickly.
Just my $.02
we run a handful of newsletters where the user can either sign themselves up online or mail in a subscription card. The AOL people mark us as spam despite the fact that we have a subscription card from them.
Being put on the spam list is a PIA because half the business uses AOL while on the road. So one half of the business can't email the other half.
Our latest experiment is to force aol subscribers to get an extra confirmation email. If that doesn't work, we will probably scrap the whole lot of them....I just hope it means we get to scrap AOL as an ISP service too...hehe
They usually blow me off until the third or fourth time they call wondering why they haven't received their weekly status report at which point they'll ask for recommendations as to which ISP to go to. The final piece de resistance is when they start raving about how much simpler email is now that they don't have to slog their way through all the ads.
Take the hint and unsubscribe them from the newsletter/mailing that they "opted" to receive.
Preach on, brutha.
I've had a good experience with the people at AOL. They have full-time staff dedicated to serving their customers and outside mail administrators alike. You can actually call them and get yourself taken off a blacklist within hours (if you're polite). They tell you the thresholds their spam filters use. Once you know how the game is played, you can decide how you continue to play. AOL is enforcing rules that they enforce on behalf of their customers.
Some suggestions for postmasters with lots of AOL customers....
1. Make sure you have forward/reverse DNS for each of your mail servers. Your odds of getting blacklisted go down sharply if you properly list your mail servers in DNS.
2. Call them and schedule a phone appointment to get your servers onto their whitelist. You tell them the business you're in and what IP addresses are servers that belong to you. You also give them a contact address (eg: aolspamcomplaints@yourdomain.com) to where they can forward spam complaints. Once you sign/fax a document that says you understand their policies, you get put on the whitelist. It's not a guarantee that you'll never get dropped, but you at least see it coming before it happens.
2a. Register an additional address on your network from which you don't send mail. If at any time one of your other addresses does get blacklisted, you have another address through which you can relay AOL mail after you address the problem.
3. Something you must do is include a user's e-mail address as part of the mail message itself (not just in the headers). If any of the users' spam reports come back to you, AOL anonymizes the headers. You'll need the address information in the body to determine which idiot hit the "this is spam" button. You might send them a warning after you recieve two messages saying that if they claim any more of your messages are spam, they get removed from your list automatically. You need to protect your mail service for all of the other AOL users you have subscribed. Something else you might do is make sure your list or company name is part of the subject line. It'll make it easy for them to know it's your content. They do want to recieve your content, yes? Make it easy for them to read or delete your message by looking at the subject line (instead of mistaking it for spam). Good mailing lists include the list name in the subject line.
I run domain-based mail forwarding service for some of my web hosting clients. My customers' domain-based e-mail is forwarded through my servers (spam and all) to their AOL account at their request. When they say "this is spam" to their inbound mail, my servers get the bad reputation, not the spammers becasue I'm the one delivering the messages to AOL's servers. It sucks, but now that I've done steps 1/2/2a after my first blacklist experience, things seem to have been going pretty well. I need to do step 3 and help educate my customers about inadvertent spam tagging, but I've been too busy to implement it.
Aside: Compared to AOL, AT&T WorldNet sucks. I got wrongfully blacklisted by them recently. Their system is not as transparent as AOL. I had to use ARIN Whois network information to find a phone number for someone who could find me a phone number of someone who could give me the e-mail address of the people to whom I can request to be taken off their blacklist (aka runaround). Getting off their list takes several days and repeated e-mails instead of a single phone call. Boo! If one is going to blacklist mail servers and reject mail, make sure the mail server puts a URL in the rejection message so that white-hat mail administrators can find policies and contact info that can help them quickly resolve errant blacklisting. To do less is poor customer service.
-ez
I've tried to get my ISP to unblock the posts, but as a subscriber I have no standing to make a formal request. The list master says they get no bounce messages, which the ISP requires postmasters to send them in order to get off the block list.
What to do ...
If you agree to the terms of business with some online site, and part of there terms is that thyey, or anyone they do business with can send you emails it is NOT spam.
Spam is not something you do not like, it's getting something you has no dealing with.
Don't like? don't agree to the service.
Once again proving that spam is not as bad as people make it out to be. The problem is lack of user knowledge and education.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Check the front page of Anti-Slash and you'll see a poster bragging about this in the "Comments in need of moderation" section. Mod the parent down. It's a repost.
1)aol users report your emails as spam
2)whine to slashdot community
3)????
4)profit!!!
Block all of all types traffic to and from AOL.
I find it rather funny that now there's a problem with spam going to AOL users.
Read, L
wow, I am touched.
and your're right, I was serious
I work for one of AOL's competitors. We also have spamlists, whitelists, and so on. The problem with these is that people are constantly trying to game the system -- and I don't just mean spammers. Here is one such scheme:
Realtors seem to be especially fond of this technique for some reason. Although we've developed ways of spotting games like this, no doubt we still wind up blocking legitimate lists from time to time.
The end result is that email, which would otherwise be idea for sporadic but time-critical notifications, is becoming damn near useless for such things. (I don't know about you, but I'd rather not have to spend time every day checking various websites just in the odd chance that some useful news has appeared.) One partial solution might be to allow personal whitelists to override system-wide spam lists. But there tends to be a chicken-and-egg problem with such a feature, since having people manually enter whitelist entries is tedious and error-prone -- there's no way to have them click on a message they never received.
As a web host, we have a BIG problem with AOL just blocking us on a whim, and when you don't get any sort of bounce or refusal from their end your email server THINKS it delivered email properly. Meaning we don't know it's happening until the complaints start.
I host a little over 13,000 web sites, on over 60 servers. We allow people to run CGI and PHP (I mean people wouldn't like it much if we didn't) and as a result we do get the occasional open formmail.cgi or formmail.php being used to spam. We usually catch them pretty fast and it doesn't happen "that" often. But it happens, and before we can stop it there might be several thousand emails sent. Which is enough to get us on AOL's block, we've been silently placed on their block roughly 7 times now. The thing is EACH TIME I signup for this "in the loop" mailing so I am SUPPOSED to get a warning as soon as spam is reported from one of my servers, ok fine, know what? Not one warning, not a single one, and we were still blocked 6 more times after that.
I applaud AOL's efforts at stopping spam, but they've got to get it to be a little less troublesome.
I will say, we haven't been blocked in a couple months now, so MAYBE we're finally on the white list "for real" so here's hoping things ARE improving.
I like earthlink's challenge response better, I'll get a couple of these per day, some are from spam with my domain forged, most are from things like invoices/reciepts/other business, I click the link and jump through the hoops and from then on things seem to flow to that email account from our billing or forum system.
--- www.f-theocean.com
Get smarter users.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And I accidentally did that last week; its real easy... Checking my email, saw the topmost message was spam, hit the topmost checkbox, and clicked the spam button. I do it so often, I barely thought about it. Until I realized the topmost checkbox was for "Check All", and I had just told Yahoo that a bunch of personal non-spam emails were spam. Oops.
Very annoying to have no confirmation prompt at ALL when you are sending 50 messages at once to the spam processor... It really is a bad UI decision. And once its clicked, no way to stop it! I wonder what processing Yahoo has in place to handle obviously erroneously marked messages?
"we have found that most of the time the AOL users are reporting our email as spam on accident!"
...
ON Purpose.
BY Accident.
English.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
If they are reporting it as spam, then it's email they don't wish to receive. That means you should stop sending it, even if they previously agreed to receive email from you.
I regularly get bounced spam virus reports from AOL because a virus somewhere forged my headers. Unfortunately, I cannot complain to AOL because AOL blocks my cable modem IP address because it is residential.
So AOL can send mail to me, but won't let me complain back.
I am collecting up a few of these. I am going to bill AOL with a nice official invoice. I doubt it will acheive much.
The recipient can still check their "spam folder" for your message. No big deal really, I look through there every once in a while to make sure nothing good went it.
Now what I want to know is why AOL is blocking entirely email from certain bittorrent forum sites...
The best opt-in I've ever seen is an RSS feed.
Mass-mailers/mail-mergers/automated-mailers (including my-cowardly-self) can deal with the fact that people are simply friggin' overwhelmed with inbox influx. I'm not an AOL user, but I've dealt with lousy unsubscribe procedures by crying "spam" to CloudMark etc... Go cry to mommy that they accidentally marked your carefully crafted newsletter as spam. Get over it.
Spread the word, RSS doesn't suck. Overload of inbox crap, opted-in or not, in the inbox does suck.
Thank you MS for making Outlook 2003 not download e-mail images by default! Thank you SpamCop and SpamHaus! Thank you Netscape engineers and Dave Winer for RSS!
While I'm on a roll. What the F is up with the national do-not-call list? Shouldn't it be a national call-me-i'm-an-idiot list instead?
RSS OPMLif they reject 90% of messages, spam will obviously go down
:)
If they block 100% of messages, there will be NO spam.
That's a better spam blocking percentage than even whitelisting since trusted senders might turn bad.
How are you handling the false reports?
Easy: we wouldn't be caught dead sending mail to people so stupid in the first place.
Yeah right, stop spamming people, you spammer!
if people are accidently marking your emails as spam, odds are they thought it was spam for a reason in the first place. Even if later they changed their mind.
Joseph Elwell.
I work on an Helpdesk. I cringe when people use the world AOL. I get a large number of people calling me telling me AOL told them there modem is dead.
I frequently spend 20-30 minutes of troubleshooting modems only to find its the AOL software. I then tell people that rather then using AOL use another ISP. I tell them to avoid Earthlink, AOL, and MSN. I suggest they look at ISP's that are locally based.
I think that AOL's software and email makes American's dumber. It allows people to live in a shielded world that lacks any understanding of how things like email really work.
I also have to deal with people having trouble sending to aol and recieving email from AOL. One other type of business i have to deal with is an email forwarding service. Many of the members of this email forwarding service have there mail forwarded to aol. Every so often AOL decides to block this customer. So this Customer got tired of handling the support calls from there members using AOL that they put in there monthly newsletter reason why you should not use AOL as your ISP and since that we have barely gotten any AOL related calls.
My though is who in IT really uses AOL ?
Every few weeks, I read another article here at Slashdot about the hell of getting off AOL's blacklist.
AOL can get away with this because they do this filtering silently. Their users have no idea what has gone on.
The solution? Stop accepting AOL email addresses from clients. Put a great big blurb on your webpage that you do NOT, under any circumstances, accept signups from AOL email addresses.
If only you do it, you'll lose a few customers with no benefit in general (though with luck, at least some percentage of those will understand your goal and switch to a "real" ISP).
If, however, everyone started doing this, AOL would have to change their policy very quickly. Imagine AOL tech support getting a few thousand calls each day, asking why every web site an AOL user goes to says they can't sign up simply because they use AOL... Yeah, that would go over well.
Take a stand! Back in the day (jeezus, I sound like a geezer), half the BBSs out there refused traffic from AOL. Why has this changed? Their user base certainly hasn't improved, and it would appear that their admins have dropped down to the legendary cluelessness level of their users. Well, don't put up with it! All the "little guys" out there need to tell AOL what they can do with their blacklist. "You want to block us??? Let's see what your users do when two out of three sites they visit refuse to serve them because they use AOL!"
...well, maybe because to some people it _IS_ spam? In my opinion, half of the time companies send emails out, it is unwanted. Some might even call it spam ;) And with modern mail filters, isn't it easier to just hit "mark as junk mail" (or however your client calls it) than to actually go through the "unsubscribe" process?
It does seem bad that all it takes is a few clicks from a few lazy users to get email blocked for _ALL_ of AOL's customers, so maybe it would be wiser for them to implement some sort of local junk mail scheme, where it's a bit more cumbersome to globally mark mail as junk for all AOL users? Just a thought...
I'd like to see that happen...
Oh, look where the "Junk" button is! ;-)
AOL works with hebeas and they got a white list so i'd think that's an easier solution to the problem.
My IRC network sends mail verification to check the users' addresses to make sure you can mail them later, and we had dynamic ip which is hell for a mail sender, solution: tunnel though some great free server i.e. myrealbox.
I'm running mail servers for quite some time now and though AOL is one of the most aggressive stupid-policy enforcers out there, I've got some totally weird bounces from mail servers that hardly have the number of users we have on our network just because they don't like it, and no explanation, no policy, no abuse-support, nothing.
Hotmail however, nothing bad to say about it, not bouncing dyn, not ending up in junk, yahoo are pretty good too though spam filter sometimes is being a bit aggressive.
The ISP where I work is currently participating in AOL's "Feedback Loop" It actually works out pretty well for us. I've got a script that downloads all of the "complaints" on a nightly basis and parses them for the IP address in our block that they come from. Then I total up the number of complaints per IP. From this I can look at IP's with more than 2 or 3 complaints and look at the actual emails sent. This has been a great tool for us to help find those users whose PC's have become infected with one of the many viruses that turns their computer into a spam relay.
To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer
I spoke with the head of AOL's security/IT system. Let me tell you they analyze EVERY e-mail that goes through their system.
Nice troll. You expect people to believe they review billions of emails per day? Hah!
If you can do this with your user base, require that all subscribers set up PGP and use PGPdomo or some similar encrypted mailing list system. That greatly reduces the likelihood of somebody pressing the spam button by mistake, and more to the point it puts a reasonably large clue barrier in front of your system, so people will tend to take it more seriously (if they're willing to put up with it, anyway...)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Mention the exact date/time/site/address they used.
For the newsletter, where it mentions that they opted in, don't merely mention the "fact" that they did. Also include the exact date/time (adjusted to their local time if possible, only need to do that once) and URL they used. If it's from a "partner", name the partner's website and date/time. Just a few more bytes per customer. And if you can do a reverse-lookup on their IP address, that's even better.
For an order, the short descriptive name of the most expensive item should be included in the subject line, e.g. "Your DressKids.com order for Embroidered Organza Dress and...", as this should instantly jog anyone's memory.
Ideally the date/time/site/address would be in both body and header (e.g. X-Subscribed-From, X-Subscribed-At - I wonder if there's a standard?). I hope you're already doing this.
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
...We can't send you mail you any more. We can't do anything unless you get another email address
My aunt sent me and several other people an inflammatory forward which, among other things, compared Sept 11th to the Holocaust, claimed the Afghanistan wedding party which was bombed was to blame for their own demise, and criticized the Palestinians for their widely broadcast and falsified celebration of Sept 11th. I replied that three thousand sudden unexpected deaths can't be compared to six million deaths through torture and medical experiments, and that it was disrespectful of the holocaust victims to do so. I also pointed out that the Palestinian celebrations were a hoax. (I later learned I was wrong on this point. Fake footage: Palestinians dancing in the street) I was upset enough about the e-mail that I sent my answer to all the recipients of the original forward.
Somebody wasn't amused at my response (or maybe an automated spam filter detected the words "hoax" and "holocaust" in the same mail?) and decided to report it as spam to yahoo. Yahoo immediately blocked my account without warning or recourse. This was very upsetting for me because I had a number of old e-mails and address information stored in that account which I didn't have anywhere else and which would have been impossible to replace. It took me several hours of research spread out over a couple of days to find the telephone number for paying customers to call and get the problem corrected.
Lessons learned: Don't keep important information in a free account. Some things are worth paying for. Don't use Yahoo.
Don't get me wrong but banning AOL users outright from services does save gobs of headaches. Just instantly get rid of folks who happen to be a cut below the rest.
And with any luck all this banning will lead AOL users to goto some non-coddling ISP, and AOL will whither and die.
Charge as much as I pay for broadband... YOU WILL GET YOUR COMEUPINS! I hear the grand canyon is void of AOL CD's... Fill that sucker to the brim.
20% of the people, are 80% of the problem... Guess what? They are all located at one ISP.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Since AOL doesn't tell the senders or the intended recipients that it's dropping emails, you need to get your *own* AOL account that you can use to make sure your emails are going through, and at least check it occasionally for Quality Assurance. Annoying, but if you're trying to deal with moderately high volumes, or smaller volumes of people who are paying you money, you probably should be doing it. I don't know if there's any way to automate your AOL system to autoforward your postings to your regular account (or to a bot on your regular system), or whether you've got to do it by hand (grumble grumble).
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Your e-mails are obviously easily mistaken for spam. Stick to always using the same From: address. Prefix the subject with your company name and keep it informative rather than marketing oriented. Then post detailed instructions for AOL users on how to filter them to a separate folder.
Better yet, let customers login to your website and read whatever information you are providing. Write an optional tray icon that will change when there is something to read and open the browser when clicked.
Spam is out of control, and if AOL didn't provide an easy way to mass-report it, e-mail would be unusable for its intended purpose. I am not going to click on each of 200 spams individually and confirm reporting. It's up to you and AOL to figure out how to correct user mistakes.
Don't do business with people that do business with AOL for starters. Let me guess, the email that you send them you probably advertise viagra? Run a legit business that doesn't require mass mailing people dork!
try { println( SigString ); } catch( Exception e ) { println( 'Who cares?' ); }
Quite a lot of marketers would be quite offended that their mass emails would be classified as "spam". It's just other people's mass emails that are spam...
For example, I sometimes get legit emails from reputable companies selling genuine products. I didn't want it, it was not a specific request for info, it's spam.
A business that makes $$$s sending email to AOL subscribers then receives legitimate postmaster warning not to send any more stuff to certain AOL animals. How apropos. The Dastards!
And this ability to select more than two items from the user's spambox before reporting spam - pure evil. Sounds like someone doesth protest too much (c) William Shakespeare 1543.
Having mailing lists is a bitch as soon you get over a couple of 1000 people on it.
Where are always people complaining about it as being spam.
Even though it's a double opt in, the mail server sending the mails, are always going to be marked in some blacklist somewhere. And you have to configure postfix right when dealing with big companies such as aol, hotmail etc. so you throttle mails send to them at a slow pace.
Perhaps you should start the emails saying.. "When you visited www.thissite.com, you requested you be sent messages concerning A and B. Well, here it is! If you'd no longer like to receive these emails, click here.." And you could title the emails with "subscription follow-up: ..", for example.
Hopefully that would help people see that they really want to receive your *cough*advertisement*cough*.
A scary number of reports are obviously false, including people reporting personal email. I sometimes get a desperate "I didn't mean to click it" message from the person later.
There's also a lot of mailing lists reported as spam even though I recognize many as being legit. People forget, or are too lazy to unsubscribe themselves.
What I do with spam reports is quickly scan and delete most, recent ones that are clearly spam (forged headers, from addresses, v1agr@ crap, I submit to spamcop. Others can get added to the system's black list. And some legitiamte mailing lists, like certain academic interest ones, I just send off the unsubscribe for the user myself.
Those I report get saved so if someone complains, I know *why* I did the action.
Sometimes I think I should just turn off the link, but it makes people feel better and I at least get the full headers this way correctly. I also sometimes notice a particularly bad problem, like when netsky.c hit and our virus defs hadn't been updated yet.
But overall, yeah, I can confirm, users report spam falsely A LOT.
When I get to work today. I should check out the logs for the newsletter sender program I have. It is setup to take all bounce backs and delete the user from the list. I should see if there are anybody in the list from AOL. If not I guess I should contact the customer and tell him that his newsletters were marked as spam.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
AOL are the largest ISP in the US, in the world if you discount DoCoMo as a mobile ISP. Most businesses can't just disregard AOL's members.
When I click "This is spam" in Yahoo mail it sends me to a page asking if I want to submit the message for analysis (presumably filter tuning), or block the sender(s). Does it bypass that for over 10 messages or something?
Freedom: "I won't!"
cragen
Those *other guys* are the bad spammers. *They're* the ones that must be stopped!
Uh huh.
With all the annoying things that AOL has, I am thinking to switching to AOL because of this policy. I do not care about people who "claim" of running a business using mass email.
I have been using the internet since early 1990s (~10 years) and I can tell you that due to spam, viiruses, and lack of any security (teaching my girl friend to use PGP was an unpleasant experience and of no benefit) my usage of email has DECREASED significantly. I even avoid giving my friends my email for the fact that I may accidentally delete their message along with junk email. Snail mail or telephone is much more reliable and less annoying for my communication.
The effect of spam is in my opinion "dramatic". The only reason you do not find that common joe user is not complaining as much is that stupid joe relies on chating (IM) clients for the major portion of usual communication.
I have no respect of any business which relies on mass email. People who accept to get emails from these businesses probably have little else to do.
I am with AOL on this
If that's true, and you work for Staples, can you get me off of your spam lists? I've done everything including calling by phone and all I get is "yes, you will be removed...in a few weeks" -- even after I said that I'd start reporting the spam as spam! (Very much bending over backward here as this is not my normal tactic for UCE.)
After about 6 months of that I gave up and just report the Staples spam along with the rest.
If you work for Office Depot or Office MAX or ... no problems! Keep up the good work!
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Can an organization that carries e-mail be classified as a common carrier?
A common carrier can not unreasonably refuse to carry anyone's traffic. They can have rules which you have to abide by but they can't be unreasonable.
The common carrier principle has been used successfully in other industries and I don't see why it doesn't apply here but of course IANAL.
IMHO you are sending out spam. I hate it when companies send me spam, just because you didnt see the tiny little "tick here for no emails" button on a form or a website. And if so many people are voting your mail as SPAM, then they must consider it spam..... So stop spamming!? lol
------ 011000110110000101101100011101100110100101101110
What bothers me about receiving social networking email is that it usually means someone has given you (the social network host) my email address without my permission. I think most people understand that you should not disclosure others' contact information to strangers without permission, but somehow ordinary people don't equate typing an email address into a web form with disclosure. And you (the social network host) are taking advantage of this ignorance. I have the same problem with send-to-a-friend articles and online greeting cards.
Call it "spam" or call it something else if you like; I call it "damn rude."
I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve. BB
I work for a major university that was blacklisted about a month and a half ago. People were marking messages sent by the university as spam. The messages weren't even sent to their AOL address, but their university address, where the user then forwarded all messages to their AOL account. I called the AOL postmasters at the number found here: http://postmaster.aol.com/contact/index.html and they told me they couldn't do anything immediately, but once the current complaints timed out, we would be added to their whitelist. It does seem to be a way to perform a DoS attack, because the guy I spoke to said that if they get enough spam reports for a specific domain, it is automatically blocked for a certain number of hours.
Just what do you mean by "agreed to receive"? To many bulk e-mailers that means something like:The only way that a firm has legitimate permission to e-mail is when all of the following conditions are met:If you didn't meet all of those conditions, you didn't have permission.
Netflix actually maintains a survey that they send from another domain if you are an AOL user who accidentally reports one of their business e-mails as spam.
It asks you whether you remember clicking on the link, and if you do, whether you meant to or not. Seems like a decent way to compile a list of replies from disgruntled AOL users who are no longer receiving shipping or billing notifications because they accidentally filed them as spam.
i wish people would quit moaning about spam ;-)
http://www.geralddavies.com/archives/000026.html#m ore
tum te tum...
Get an AoL account (Not gona happen with me.... Snowflake, hell.. ok?)
Sign up to a Microsoft develupers list (Ahem, Not gona happen, Snowflake, hell.)
"Accadentally" click on the spam report button.
Or better yet post this suggestion on Slashdot and let thousands of Slashdotters do it.
(PS Better if you already have an AoL account and develup Windows apps)
Then let Microsoft and AoL fight it out. And chear on Microsoft...
I don't actually exist.
In my experience, people sometimes confuse the idea of spam, unwanted commerical email, with mail that's automatically sent to them that they don't want to deal with. There's an online game I play (http://www.eyeplaygames.com) where they email you a reminder when your game gets enough people to start. We've had several people in the group block the emails because they're sent even in cases where you were the last person to sign up, or where you're the only participant. ^_^ Plus most of these people are addicts enough that they're more likely to notice the game started by their compulsive checking than by the email. Anyhow, I'm mildly surprised JoeBot hasn't gotten blacklisted by AOL yet... Then too, I've seen people use the "Mark as Spam" button as being interchangeable with the "Delete Button." Some sincerely didn't seem to understand the difference as both got rid of the email.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
My ISP had its entire domain blacklisted by AOL for several days, maybe a week, on multiple occasions. This was a particularaly shady move by AOL because I don't live in a particularly tech-savvy town. The users just didn't understand why their email to all of their AOL using friends was being returned, while the AOL users were just fine. This made my ISP look bad and AOL look good even though AOL was causing the problem. AOL insisted that my ISP was spamming their users. I think that this was probably the result of the last couple batches of viruses. If this was true, then AOL was probably a bigger spammer than anyone else. ISPs can not control their users infected computers.
Why doesn't anything interesting happen when I have mod points?
I haven't spotted a post mentioning the Tech Support burden.
There are lots of IT staff posting here, telling their tales of woe, and my point is that AOL have craftily shifted the burden of support from their own (probably inadequate) tech support lines to your companies'.
That's certainly the case at my site's helpdesk, where they regularly field calls from AOL or Planet Online customers who are confused by their ISP's mail handling and expect us to sort it out. This is reasonable in the eyes of the customer, because our organization is the one with the blackholed emails; no-one else is.
It just peeves me that we're being taken for a ride by these corporates. And no, we can't, sadly, just say "bugger off to AOL tech support" - they're our customers, too.
The average joe who only knows enough to barely use aol doesn't realise that giving out someone else's email address is the equivalent of giving out their phone number. Many people, when asked for a mutual friend's phone number will instead offer to pass along a message with your phone number, rather than risk upsetting the other person. What they don't realise is that by giving out my email address to any site, willy-nilly, is the same thing. Perhaps we need to set up a strongly worded netiquette site and refer anyone who has the temerity to give out our email addresses there. I know I can certainly think of many more pet peeves to add as well.
not to use them. AOL caters to the lowest common denominator among computer lusers. Poor operability, buggy unstable software, but it has the bells, whistles and flashy things that impress the dipshits it's aimed at.
I work for a company that sends bulk email (opt-out, though I try to be diligent about pruning/maintaining the list). The two companies/domains I loathe at the moment are merck.com, whose bounce notices doesn't include the originating email to be removed, and lucent.com, who blacklisted the mailserver upstream. I'm not too fond of one of our users either, but that' merely because email sent to her address seems to keep running off to another domain (similar name) where it hits every account at the office.
In AOL's favor, the bounces from them include sufficient information to remove the offending address.
(posting anonymously because I'm too lazy to log in)
I work at a public university. One of the problems a public university has to deal with is the phenomenon of clueless users in dorms/offices/wireless connections, who may or may not become spam zombies.
In addition, there's all the wonderful viruses that exist, and the fact that spammers regularly spoof their emails to appear to have come from us in hopes of getting through.
We've tried contacting AOL to get through, no luck. We've begged their "Spam Czar" to whitelist just the university's email server - they can go ahead and block email from the rest of the IP range, we really don't care, but we want our email server whitelisted for obvious reasons - nothing.
Every day by about 10 AM, if we're lucky, we've been blacklisted.
We're a public university. We don't send "opt-in" marketing or, for that matter, any marketing. AOL just doesn't care to deal with it, they seem willing to accept a 25% or higher false-positive rate and claim that it's helping people.
Just another reason AOL sucks.
This is the way that I handle getting email from a company with whom I placed an order. First off, I create a special email address just for them (bestbuy@mydomain.com). Then if I get ads from them to that address, I don't consider it spam. I also don't have a problem with clicking the "unsubscribe me" link for ads directed at a specially created address. If I get ads from places other than the company named in the email, then they sold my address. If that happens (and it hasn't!) I stop accepting mail to that account and I won't buy from that company again. The majority of the spam that I get is addressed to mozilla@mydomain.com, because I posted something with that address on a newsgroup. Luckily, the only valid messages that I get to that account are from bugzilla and I just filter anything not from them and to that account directly into my spam folder. Of course, all of this is a bit too complex for the AOL users we're talking about.
I work in the admissions department for a major US college, and AOL has shunted all our emails to high school students to their spam folders. So when we offer to send out admissions decisions online, AOL customers can't get theirs, and have to wait about a week longer to receive their snailmail versions. How exactly do we fix this?
our members have agreed to receive
Depends. Did they really agree to receive it, or did they just forget to uncheck the "receive promotions from our affiliates" when signing up for free porn?
-no broken link
I spent some time with my customer rep at the hosting service, and while they fully understood my point of view, they just couldn't fight AOL, so they asked me to drop all of the AOL.com addresses.
And that's what I did. I emailed all of those members, offered them help and support to setup free webmail accounts, and then dropped every aol.com accounts.
What's really ironic was that AOL told us a member complained that they were getting email from us, and we even received a copy of the offending email. It was a mailing list post from another member. You have to go through the usual subscribing process (register, wait for an email, reply, confirm, etc) to get on that list in the first place!
In the end, it turned out to be great for us, since most of my time was spent dealing with aol.com blocked emails anyway. The site runs very smoothly now.
Phemur
1. Stop sending SPAM 2. ....
3. Profit !
When malware on the net spoofs my domain as sender to a non-existent user@aol.com, then the AOL MAILER-DAEMON spams me with a bounce. My domain even has valid SPF info proving that the original message did not come from my domain. Take your own medicine, AOL!
Seriously.
.mil email addresses) has been automatically 'opted in' without their prior approval. Anti-spam advocates said CAN-SPAM will allow millions of U.S. businesses to flood the Internet with even more email marketing. If that is the case, I am, at last, ready to funnel it all to my spam archive for convenient perusal and deletion thanks to the program I wrote and use for just this purpose (see sig).
Use the email Subject: line to remind the customer of their previous order ie:
Subject: From example.com -- Invoice #123 for your order placed March 20, 2004
That way, unless their short-term memory is shot or they are incompetent/dishonest, they won't misconstrue your email as spam.
(Our marketing you opt into while ordering, don't flame me, we do not purchase lists!)
Do they consciously have to opt out (ie. check the 'do not bother me unless I order something from you and only then only send order related information only' box) to avoid unwanted, non-order related email from your company? You should change it to an 'opt in' approach. People who consciously opt in want to be marketed to and would be on the lookout for your email ads. Unless they were incompetent/dishonest or had bad short-term memory, they would only report your email ads as spam by genuine mistake (ie. a 'mouseslip' caused them to hit 'report as spam' rather than 'delete').
What I am driving at is that the average person doesn't want to expend any more effort than is necessary in order to get something accomplished. If you run your email system with that in mind, the number of problems you are having now should drop to almost zero (if not zero).
However, thanks to the passage of CAN-SPAM at the 'behest' of the Direct Marketers Association, everybody in America with an email address (with some exceptions no doubt--.gov and
If you have a lucrative business IP that makes money "forwarding mail" to AOL customers, you should be required to run SpamAssassin or other bayesian filtering, or something to reduce the spam you send your customers.
If you don't, and AOL (or your hosting ISP) hassles you, you have no ligitimate argument.
If you're going to pretend you're an ISP and forward mail to AOL'ers and charge them, you should be providing something for the service besides a matador-like full forward with no filters.
As a provider of a few special-interested community mailing lists, this caused some amount of consternation when AOL threatened to cut off the address block containing my server, and the folks who graciously supply me with bandwidth. Given that this is a properly operating Mailman list server and lists which have been serving this community gratis for well over a decade, anyone can unsubscribe themselves with a moderate amount of intelligence.
My only alternative is to either take a lot of time to verify that the user meant to unsubscribe - and I'll do that for friends - or as keeping with the AOL threat letter - simply unsubscribe them with extreme prejudice. I both remove them from the list and prevent them from ever re-subscribing with that AOL address. In the unsubscribe message it tells them if they want to re-subscribe, they can send a notarized letter declaring their intention to subscribe along with a re-instatement fee.
If these lists didn't run themselves I'd have given up doing it long ago, but with great open-source software and a little help from friends, there are 2,000 subscribers in a dozen countries that my mail server (now mailman on an ibook) diligently fowards mail to. If they want to access the internet with training wheels, that's fine right up until they waste my time.
I host a few domains for people who have their e-mail forwarded to AOL. Despite my running some elaborate spam filtering, AOL reacted to their reporting of spams forwarded to them through their domains here by blocking my IP, since my IP had been the last to touch the spam before sending it on. AOL did not even have the courtesy to send a notice to the standard "postmaster@domain" address that anyone seriously running a mail server monitors. To AOL's credit, I was able to immediately get through by phone once I saw what was happening. But for AOL to block communications without notification goes against the whole idea of taking responsibility for the quality of the Net.
/dev/null it or whatever else they like. They're basically using this as a way to act aggressively against small, legitimate Net businesses.
Now AOL's also backing up mail to these several users in my mail queue whenever it contains a URL that any AOL user has associated with spam. Granted, these are largely really spam - but why make a legitimate (not open) relaying server take the load from this? It ends up with my server trying to send a notice back up the line to what's usually the spammer's false From address, when AOL could easily enough receive the mail and then
Since my clients aren't always able to figure out which of the spams they've received on AOL was relayed from here, I've had to tell them that if they report any spam at all to AOL so as to get me blocked again I'll have to block their mail forwarding. I have to be hardass because AOL is being AsshOLe.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I can't find a link or other information on this site about a "feedback loop." How do I get on it?
-- Have you ever noticed that at trade shows, Microsoft is always the company that is handing out stress balls?
As others have said: your problem is clueless sysadmins who have failed to properly firewall the dorms/offices/access points. Allowing outbound port 25 from random user PCs is bad netiquette that deserves blocking.
Every day by about 10 AM, if we're lucky, we've been blacklisted.We haven't been on any blacklists since a couple septembers ago when we instituted our internal SMTP whitelist.
Just print off a snail mail letter to the customer and to AOL, confirming that you've removed their account because you were reported as spamming them. This puts the onus on the customer. Or send an email confirmation to the customer from another server?
You can't trust "unsubscribe" links, as all they do is confirm that you read your email. :P
I know this reply is too late to bed modded anything, but I'll say it anyway.
Last August, I had been getting way too much spam in my main mailbox. I had heard that unsubscribing just backfired and gives you even more mail, so I never did it. Then, after deleting 15-30 spam messages per day-- every day-- I decided that the spam couldn't get too much worse than this (yes, I know it can, but the point is I was sick of it). I had also read a few months prior to this in Maximum PC's article on spam that the spammers "swear the unsubscribe links work" even though they also recommended to not use them. I decided to give unsubscriptions a try.
I opened every spam mail, going straight to the unsubscribe link every time, and typing in my e-mail address, etc...
I noticed that after opening the unsubscribe links, many of them are sent by the same company and use the same unsubscribe page (whether legitimately or not, is something else altogether).
I did this process religiously for about 4-5 weeks straight. By the second week, I noticed a considerable decrease in my spam. By the fourth week, I had no unwanted e-mail, and it was refreshing. I'm sure there are some people out there who have a story about getting screwed ove by the unsubscribe links, but this is my story, and it's true.
Email was and is meant for one person to send a message to another. It has been adapted and misused by corporate America to do all sorts of things it was never intended for... order confirmations and spam being two of them.
It is a miracle it works for it's intended purpose, I wouldn't complain about problems with using it for business purposes, it isn't meant for that. RFC 1822 doesn't define a mission critical app. If this is a mission critical feature of your application you should design a mission critical capable system.
A bookmarked status page comes to mind as an acceptible alternative for monitoring order status. At least you have control over how the status is delivered...
l8,
AC
Clearly, humans aren't even 100% accurate. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
I've seen many people think that their newsletter recipients want it, when it just turns out to be SPAM. Don't think that just because you aren't trying to sell penis pills, you aren't SPAM. Many "legit" emailings overdue it. Amazon was a big offender a few years ago when it started to send me ads on a daily basis.
This is a start, yeah. You do still have zombie issues, whereby the programs/controllers look up common relay hostnames and/or check Outlook (Express) configurations, but it helps immensely with the spam problem.
Once you do that, the ISP still has problems with users spamming through their relays, but its quite simple for them to detect and auto-block the abusers of that. Or just tiergrub and/or tarpit the high-rate senders, etc...
We've implemented all of this here (I work as a sysadmin at a large ISP), as well as Zero-RDNS blocking, and cut down a LOT of spam.
The Bonded Sender program, where an email sender puts cash on deposit with a third party, and then forfeits that cash if the third party receives spam complaints, is an effective tool for identifying non-spam.
And like most sensible people, they realize that most AOL users are idiots and don't count count complaints from AOL users in determining if you're a spammer.
I run a mail forwarding server for about 20,000 users. We land on att.com, worldnet.com, and occasionally cox.com's blacklist about once every three weeks. It has been impossible to get hold a human at these organization who can do anything besides recite the "send email to abuse" mantra.
We just tell our users, "here's a nickel, kid, get yourself a better ISP."
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Our primary means of business is acquiring new satisfied customers through email. We work hard to gather new prospects through combing Usenet posts, guestbook entries and mailto tags. Having so many emails to AOL addresses falsely reported as spam not only increases the workload for us, but deprives the AOL users of the benefits we can provide.
We can only hope that cooler heads prevail, and that AOL corrects its spam reporting facility. And that we are quickly removed from MAPS, ORB, Spamhaus, SpamAssassin, SPEWS, and all your .procmailrc files.
Sincerely
Alan Chickenboner
9243 Lantana Blvd.
Boca Raton, Nigeria
http://www.elite-meds-rx.com
Most of you are missing the point. There is not reason for our sysadmins to be calling AOL. Simply educate your customers/users that you cannot guarantee that they will get valid email if they subscribe to AOL. THEY should complain to AOL abou it. Not us as third parties. Just tell customers not to use AOL and things will be fine. That is the most effective campaign you can mount. Let them drop the messages without complaining for THEIR customers. That is the most effective way to have AOL go out of business or come up with a competent business model. So don't bother whitelisting yourselves, tell your customers to abandon AOL. Billboards across America "AOL, Just Say No!"
This may have already been posted but even so its probably worth repeating anyway: You can help your newsletter cause on AOL tremendously by using a short, concise e-mail address that clearly identifies who you are and a short descriptive subject. The current AOL mail web client still fixes the mailbox display of the from address to only a few characters and while the main AOL client now finally permits the adjustment of the From column to see the entire address, many people don't take the time or don't know they can. That means that if you send your newsletter from "todaysnewsletter@yourlongcompanyname.com", the AOL user will probably only see "todays.." as the From address. If you have combined this with a not very obvious Subject line (or one easily confused with Spam), then you are doomed to be accidentally sent to the Spam box. Instead, use an address like "news@yourcompany.com" and back that up with a Subject like "Company News: Latest P4 Reviewed".
I really don't think companies should make much of an effort to block spam, especially plain out trashing it. It only screws up legit e-mails. I've had my e-mail address for 4 years now, and used it a good amount, and I still only get spam about twice a month, if that. I don't see how dumb you have to be to get 40 e-mails a day (as I've heard certain people at school talk about...). The only way I can see that possible is to enter your e-mail into every porn e-zine you can find. Seriously.
As a hosting provider, we have hundreds of clients who are also AOL clients. Many of them forward all of their email sent to their hosting account with us to their aol email account.
When a SPAM is sent to their hosting account...it gets forwarded to their aol account along with all of their other emails. If they then click the 'report spam' button on aol's side for this SPAM message, AOL MARKS OUR SERVER AS THE CULPRIT AND NOT THE ORIGINAL SPAMMER!.
Obviously this is a problem which has caused us many sleepless nights:(
Bill Green
http://hostspring.com
if aol were to give a short explination as to what spam really is, unsolicited mail, then maybe the accidental spam reporting rate would drop, a confermation from an online purchase is not spam, and if clarrified would help greatly.
Look, if your NAT gateway can't handle RFC1918, that's not a DNS problem, it's a sysadmin problem.
I have over 400 hosts on RFC1918 addressing, as well as my home network of 9 nodes (counting the cluster as one) and all of them reverse-resolve without problems.
It's trivial. (Certainly easier than connection-tracking and packet reformatting, which are required for RFC1918-based NAT.) Inside the NATted network, DNS lookups resolve to the RFC-1918 address. From outside the NATted network, DNS lookups resolve to the outside gateway address. Either way, reverse resolution returns the inverse of forward resolution. With versions of BIND that support views, you can do this from a single nameserver node (although it's a better idea to have physically separate internal and external DNS servers).
Remember, there is no requirement for a one-to-one relationship between addresses and names in forward lookups. You can have hundreds of nodes resolve to the gateway address when looked up from outside the NATted network.