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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."

49 of 371 comments (clear)

  1. Whaaaat? Cluesless AOL users? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Who would've thought that possible.

    1. Re:Whaaaat? Cluesless AOL users? by Moonpie+Madness · · Score: 4, Informative

      Dont be too hard on AOL, if it weren't for that sore thumb '@aol.com' it'd be a lot harder for me to identify dummies out there. dumb people are simply a fact of life, and they deserve to get some internet access. a spoon feeding paternalistic service is great for them, and worth the money, and they give a lot of their money (more loosely than most) to a lot of internet businesses, though i have to admit they arent really much effect on the Linux community

    2. Re:Whaaaat? Cluesless AOL users? by pete6677 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      A lot of people, even some who are somewhat computer literate, will click the Report Spam button on an email from a mailing list that they no longer want to subscribe to instead of actually unsubscribing. They have no idea how much this screws up spam filtering and reporting systems.

    3. Re:Whaaaat? Cluesless AOL users? by l810c · · Score: 4, Funny
      Not only are they Clueless, but your typical AOL user has:

      A Short Flaccid Penis
      A High Mortgage Rate
      High Insurance Rates
      A Hugh Amount of Debt
      No Online Diplomas
      Does Not work from home..

  2. Not your fault - you're dealing with AOL by eaglebtc · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!
  3. I have this same problem by Xshare · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:I have this same problem by Thing+I+am · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Stay on hold a bit? The first time I called, I was on hold for 25 minutes. The second time was a bit less, 18 minutes. The loop of music they play sucks too.

      --
      That sucking sound you hear is my bandwidth.
  4. You asked.... by Smitedogg · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    Dogg
  5. no chance for us... by wo1verin3 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I 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.

    1. Re:no chance for us... by techno-vampire · · Score: 4, Informative

      A few years ago, AOL was known to block all mail from random domains to lower its server load when things got overloaded. I see no reason to think they've stopped.

      --
      Good, inexpensive web hosting
    2. Re:no chance for us... by jCaT · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Plenty of mail servers do this. In practice I've seen both AOL and Yahoo mail do this at certain times during the day. The thing is, the way the email is "blocked" does not cause it to never get delivered... it is just delayed. The mail just gets a deferred, and it is up to the mail server to try sending it again until it is accepted by the remote server.

      The implications are that the message is not delivered *IMMEDIATELY*, but it will get there... just late.

  6. My email never gets blocked by AOL by Grey+Ninja · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  7. it is a tough situation by LupusUF · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:it is a tough situation by circusnews · · Score: 5, Funny
      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 have found having 20 or 30 AOL users call AOL's tech support screaming about AOL bouncing importiant mail as spam gets you off the list fairly quickly.

  8. Had the same problem... by Keighvin · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  9. SourceForge mailing lists are blocked by AOL by tramm · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I run several projects on SourceForge, including autopilot, that have had all of the AOL subscribers removed from the mailing lists due to spam bounces. Since so many AOL users receive mail from SourceForge hosted mailing lists, it does not take many accidentally clicking the spam button to blacklist the SF servers.

    I submitted a support request to SF about it, and they said (rightfully) that it is AOL's problem.

    --
    -- http://www.swcp.com/~hudson/
    1. Re:SourceForge mailing lists are blocked by AOL by ajs · · Score: 4, Interesting

      This has been AOL's approach since the beginning. They started with convoluted means of "proving" that you were not a spammer. Then they moved on to refusing to listen to any servers that they considered "residential"...

      I really expect that within the next 5 to 10 years, they will not send or recieve email at all unless it involves a "partner" of theirs.

    2. Re:SourceForge mailing lists are blocked by AOL by Neon+Spiral+Injector · · Score: 3, Funny

      And the circle will be complete. AOLers should have never been let loose on the Internet in the first place. :P

  10. AOL almost knows me by name.... by m0rb0 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!

  11. My experience... by ptomblin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!
  12. Re:User's don't report Spam on accident.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  13. This happened to me. by cmburns69 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!
  14. Re:On accident? by batkiwi · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?

  15. Hey retard by autopr0n · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.
  16. A human is a lousy spam filter by titaniam · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  17. Issues with AOL and email by baddogatl · · Score: 3, Informative

    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 :)

  18. Small lists too... by dcigary · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    ...my Karma ran over your Dogma...
  19. AOL is quite reasonable by arglesnaf · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!)

    1. Re:AOL is quite reasonable by LordWoody · · Score: 5, Informative

      Reverse DNS, eg: 192.168.1.1 -> mail.yourdomain.com
      forward DNS: mail.yourdomain.com -> 192.168.1.1

      Woody

      --
      Never meddle in the affairs of dragons,
      for you are crunchy and good with catsup.
    2. Re:AOL is quite reasonable by Surazal · · Score: 5, Informative

      I had to deal with this issue a lot while working as a system administrator at the last company I worked at.

      I don't know about other domain name servers (like Microsoft's offerings, for instance), but I know in BIND, it's not only necessary to set up the forward resolution of a hostname, for instance:

      www.slashdot.org => 66.35.250.151

      It's also necessary to explicitly set this up too:

      66.35.250.151 => www.slashdot.org

      The reason it's necessary to define the reverse hostname resolution is because a hostname may resolve to the same IP address as several, or even hundreds of other hostnames. Rob Malda could have www.shashdot.org, my.slashdot.org, woohoo.slashdot.org all to the same IP address. But the IP address can only reverse-resolve to one hostname by definition. So, you define both the forward lookups and reverse lookups explicitly so that your company network can run smoothly without anyone knoiwing the major hack you just pulled to *get* the thing running. :^)

      Sometimes, though, even seasoned admins forget to put in the reverse-lookup rules in there as a matter of oversight. For this reason you see a lot of automated scripts at ISP's that handle hostname maintanance for you.

      And, unfortunately, they didn't have this set up at my last job.

      (story, boss wants a new server set up, I have to make a phone call to set up the new IP address and hostname to our system adminsitrators at the data center)

      Me: "Can you get hostname blah.blah.blah pointing to 10.0.0.123?"
      Other Guy: "Sure! Will be going in a few hours or so"
      Me: "No problem"

      Three hours later...

      Me: "Um, I wanted the reverse-lookup tables set up, too."
      Other Guy: "What? Why do you need reverse lookup tables?"
      Me: "Because half the network applications ever written since the inception of the internet require that be done *every time*. Just like the last 7 times I asked you to do this."

      Yeah, I hated my last job. :^)

      --
      --- Journals are boring; Go to my web page instead
    3. Re:AOL is quite reasonable by Glug · · Score: 5, Insightful

      (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.

    4. Re:AOL is quite reasonable by Lost+Race · · Score: 5, Informative
      But the IP address can only reverse-resolve to one hostname by definition.
      No, one IP address can resolve to many hostnames.
      $ORIGIN 0.168.192.in-addr.arpa.
      1 ptr hosta.example.com.
      1 ptr hostb.example.com.
      1 ptr hostc.example.com.

      % host 192.168.0.1
      1.0.168.192.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer hosta.example.com.
      1.0.168.192.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer hostb.example.com.
      1.0.168.192.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer hostc.example.com.
      Similarly one hostname can resolve to multiple IP addresses.
      % host mx1.mail.yahoo.com.
      mx1.mail.yahoo.com has address 64.156.215.7
      mx1.mail.yahoo.com has address 64.157.4.78
      mx1.mail.yahoo.com has address 64.157.4.79
      mx1.mail.yahoo.com has address 67.28.114.33
      mx1.mail.yahoo.com has address 64.156.215.5
      mx1.mail.yahoo.com has address 64.156.215.6
  20. AOL is unaccountable for blocking by eggboard · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  21. This drives me, and my customers nuts by Bug-Y2K · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  22. Re:Lucky clients... by Unholy_Kingfish · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Seriously - I'm not sure what business you're in, but do your clients really need to be using AOL?

    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
  23. My bitch about AOL by DarkHelmet · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Ah God... AOL is a complete and total bitch when it comes to detecting spam.

    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
  24. Some Practical Advice by ErichTheWebGuy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  25. Affecting my university by m3000 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  26. Standard practice at AOL by techno-vampire · · Score: 3, Funny

    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
  27. Playing nicely with AOL (Re:Take the hint) by ziegast · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

  28. Oh man don't get me started on this... by Grimster · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  29. Re:remember kids by the+arbiter · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  30. ISP Standpoint by The_Systech · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
  31. Something that might help... by goldfndr · · Score: 3, Interesting
    You might already be doing this, but if you aren't, I suggest:

    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)
  32. Staples = Spammers by Spoing · · Score: 4, Interesting
    1. I am postmaster and in the IT security department of a fortune 150 Office Supply company.

    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.
  33. Re:Double Opt-In is a meaningful term by eaolson · · Score: 3, Insightful
    "Double opt-in" means that you asked to be on the list, and the list sent mail to you asking if you're *sure* you want to be on the list, and you ask *again* to be put on the list.

    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"

  34. Re:AOL is completely UNREASONABLE. by Mullen · · Score: 3, Informative
    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.


    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!
  35. Unsubscribing Much Better Now by SeinJunkie · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  36. Re:AOL is completely UNREASONABLE. by __david__ · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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.
    No no and no. If some idiot blocks port 25 then I can't run my own mail server! I don't trust my ISP as far as I can throw them. When their mail server is down I can't send any mail. I bought bandwidth, I have a server, I don't want arbitrary ports blocked. This is exactly the reason I switched away from stupid earthlink DSL to my current cable modem.

    -David