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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."
I am not sure about what he means by clients, but we have this problem with customers. One of the sites I manage DressKids.com , sends out an email conformation for the order, a CC card conformation from the processor (not my choice) and then an email when the order is shipped. Plus we send out a newsletter about every 3-4 months. Pretty reasonable right? We don't spam, we don't sell lists. Our emails do not get through to AOL subscribers. Why? because people repost them as spam, whether it is intentional or not. We get many phone calls from cranky customers complaining they didn't get their email. But those same people are reporting those emails as spam. About 20% of our base is on AOL. Most of them are new moms/housewives on AOL. They have no clue what they are doing. Plus they don't care that they have no clue and take it out on us. AOL needs to do something about this. Having to contact AOL on a regular basis to reverse something dumb that their customers are doing is unreasonable. Spam is a problem, no argument with that. But when legit emails do not get through because of false reports, who's fault is it? Who should fix it? Who has the time?
Fear Is the Only God
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
(Our marketing you opt into while ordering, don't flame me, we do not purchase lists!)
Not a flame, just letting you know: If I place an order with a company, I never check any boxes that opt me in to receive advertising. If I get "defaulted" to receiving ads and do receive some later, then I report the spam to the company's upstream and, obviously, I never buy anything from that company again. You might check to see whether your order forms try to "default" people into receiving spam or not - it is possible that the opt-in list that your marketing department thinks it has accumulated is not an opt-in list at all, and that people are reporting your company's email as spam because your company is in fact sending them unsolicited bulk email.