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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!
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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 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!
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!
You, Sir, are an idiot.
A lot of users subscribe to some stuff, then are too lazy or too stupid to unsubscribe again.
Since we are talking about AOL users, the benefit of doubt definitely belongs to the sender in this case.
Sheesh.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I hope you know that you are now filtering out all mail from aolacom! Not to mention aolecom, aolucom, ... oh forget it.
/aol\.com/i for the RE?
Maybe you meant
"Send an Instant Karma to me" - Yes
Trouble with people complaining at AOL is that the complaint doesn't get forwarded to the sender... so you can't really avoid them again.
When he said members, perhaps he has some mailing list software that defines subscriptions to the list(s) as membership. Obvious terminology to a techie and not businessman.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
Well, here's the awful truth. Frequently, I'll buy something from a site, and as part of that purchase they'll make the completely unrealistic demand that I agree to receive emails from anyone they deem fit to sell the address to, or maybe even just from themselves whenever they like.
But, I don't want these emails. Just the product, thanks. I know where to find them should I need more. But this sentiment is not respected. They want to maximize their sales at any cost, and damn my peace of mind.
Now, I do realize, fully, that I agreed to this condition as part of the purchase.
And, well, that's too bad. I'm sure I'll spend some time in hell roasting for it, but I have absolutely no intention of honoring that commitment. It's unrealistic to assume that anyone would want to do so. Be realistic, not idealistic, I say.
So, I report the unwanted mails as spam. Every time. And, in all seriousness, I hope it causes them a tremendous amount of expense and hassle to resolve it. If they have to do this enough times, perhaps they'll think of a new method of doing business that doesn't piss off their customers so much.
Remember, for this is what business still lives and dies by: The customer is really always right.
If your customers report your "newsletters", "reminders", etc., as spam, they're not stupid, they're not doing it because of an "AOL design flaw" and they're not doing it by accident. They consider them as spam. You should respect the obvious message you're being sent, their clear message that you're to leave them alone, and take the proper and decent course of action. Stop sending these folks mail. If they want it, they'll tell you loud and clear.
Good luck. Business is not easy. Don't make it harder on yourself than you have to.
Boycott everything - they're all trying to fuck you one way or another
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 OPMLWell, here's the awful truth. Frequently, I'll buy something from a site, and as part of that purchase they'll make the completely unrealistic demand that I agree to receive emails from anyone they deem fit to sell the address to, or maybe even just from themselves whenever they like.
You're buying from the wrong places. Reputable, decent vendors give you the opportunity to opt out of any third-party or even first-party non-transaction-related emails. Ever since I bought something online from Macy's, I get mail from them every time they have a sale, but I don't get mail from anyone else who is their "partner." I'm careful what I click, and read the messages (sometimes it's "check here if you want us to send you tons of email" and sometimes it's "check here if you DON'T want us to send you tons of email"). If they're not giving you that option, don't buy from them, for pete's sake.
Oh, and, how can I tell whether my spam is from "partners" or from scum-sucking bottom dwellers? Whether they call me "pixel" or "Monica." The companies I actually do business with know my name.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
...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...
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, that's confirmed opt-in. "Double opt-in" is a term made up by spammers to make the confirmation step sound difficult and unnecessary.
The purpose of the email isn't to double-check that you still want to be on a mailing list, but to verify that the person that submitted your email address was, indeed, you.
username/password isn't a "double login"
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
Well, I don't know if you can pursue this tactic, but you could block outbound SMTP from user subnets, I know of at least 2 public and two private universities that do just that. (I worked on university networks in a previous career)
Block port 25, period. There, you just fixed the problem.
Why any ISP of any kind that lets port 25 traffic go outboung is beyound me. There is no legit use for it and all outbound mail should be handled by the ISP's mail server. No one should be sending mail from client to mailserver. It should be Client -> ISP mailserver -> Other ISP mailserver -> Other Client.
Linux O Muerte!
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.
-David
There. Now go play some cool javascript games!
Those who do not own their own domain can accomplish the same thing using disposable addresses available from services like SpamGourmet or Sneakemail.
Having said that, as long as ISPs provide a simple method of "registering" access to other mail servers (e.g. a web page where you enter your user ID and the names of mail servers you need port 25 access to) and make this information available with their bounce messages, then a block of port 25 would be reasonable. Spam zombies are a problem that is going to get a lot worse...
Actually I meant literal September. It's a real phenomenon, not just a funny phrase. In early September of both 2000 & 2001 we were listed by ORBL et al due to open proxies in the freshmen dorms. In 2002 we blocked SMTP from the dorms, and we lived happily ever after.