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AOL Treats Florida Emergency Alerts Mail As Spam
ScentCone writes "Florida's Indian River County has 4,200 subscribers to their e-mailed emergency alerts, which provide a heads-up on hurricanes, tornados, and other weather events. Subscribers like it, but if they're using AOL mailboxes, those alerts are being treated as spam. All of the subscribers get the mail blast as weather events unfold, and spam pattern detectors are being set off. The county emergency coordinator laments the resulting unreliability of the communication channel, and while few of us at this point think of cross-domain e-mail as reliably mission critical, the AOL-bound portion of a 4200-address blast doesn't seem like much in the spam scheme of things. My experience is that it doesn't take many receivers to mark mail as spam before the domain-wide filters lower some scoring threshold, and the pattern detectors kick in. How many of us run systems that include explicitly voluntary, opt-in e-mail subscription mechanisms which are then reported as spam by the subscribing recipients? This seems increasingly common, and even the whitelisting by smarter recipients doesn't fix it."
I use Scan USA and a few other systems for alerts in California. The system itself connects to a couple of the region-wide emergency information networks such as the Amber Alert system, and can sent out information to a variety of sources such as SMS devices, etc. It's still in the early stages.
I do not see them being useful or reliable in a severe emergency like an earthquake, but they may be useful for Amber Alerts, a chemical leak from one of the oil refineries or weather alerts. I also worry if I'll see a message from Big Brother to keep an eye open for "Felon Guy Montag spotted at Spruce and Main streets", but that's another discussion.
Yahoo sometimes marks these messages as Spam, even if the sender is in my addressbook.
I have a couple theories why these messages are marked as Spam:
1. People may sign up with these alert systems and then forget they are on the mailinglists, and mark the email as spam. No surprise here, it happens all the time.
2. Many of these email alert systems don't contain useful content in the email. Instead, they ask you to click on a link to visit a website with more information. See this example from ScanUSA:
Subject: New Alert
SCAN, the Secure Cops Alert Network, has broadcast an alert:
Date Issued: 01.03.2005 12:01:21 PT
Alert Type: OTHER ALERT
Alert Priority: INFORMATIONAL
Click on this link to view the entire alert:
http://www.scanusa.com/viewalert.php?something
That's it. The "Alert" is pretty vague.
In a quick glance, many people may mistake this for Spam because they do not contain much of useful information, which makes it more likely that they will mark the alert as Spam. I get "Stock Alert" spam all the time.
It seems like the email itself should contain the actual Alert, with a hyperlink to the website with more information.
If the emergency email is sent to 50,000 people and everyone clicked at on the link at the same time, the site may die at the same moment when the Alert should be promote as heavily as possible.
When the site comes back up later on, the Alert may have been resolved.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
I'm beginning to see quite a few forums and other places that use e-mail addresses saying things like "Please don't use an AOL address here, enter another e-mail address" and so on. AOL is getting a bad reputation for its handling of mail.
AOL has no problem with blacklisting people willy-nilly, even if they're other ISPs. I only have experience with a few large companies and their mail systems, but all have been blocked by AOL at some time or another for some supposed transgression.
It's high-time that those of us who run web-apps, and the like, took a stand against AOL and banned the use of their e-mail addresses in our systems. They're more trouble than they're worth.
People bitch and moan about AOL blocking things, but they are easy to work with and willing to white list your mailings.
From a whois of aol.com
Technical Contact:
America Online, Inc.
22000 AOL Way
Dulles, VA 20166
US
Tel. 703 265 4670
Email: domains@aol.net
If you are doing mass mailings you need to setup a feedback loop with AOL in order to track the amount of complaints your mailings are generating. If you keep the complaint level below their set thresh hold you will not have problems with AOL, it's really as simple as that.
Yes, but the problem is that AOL's so called "whitelist" is more like a gray list. My company has an extensive parternship with AOL supplying all of their real estate listings yet still we can not get all of our email through their servers. Essentially their whitelist just gives you more leeway for those dumb people who would rather mark something as spam instead of unsubscribing from something they asked for. Instead of only needing X "this is spam" clicks we need X+Y number of clicks. so. freaking. dumb.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
I work for a company that emails its clients once a month, of which a double digit percentage are AOL users.
Everything you need to know about getting your emails accepted by AOL is available at their Postmaster@AOL site.
Basically you need to have SPF records setup, clearly defined unsubscribe links and subjects, and preventative measures so you don't keep re-emailing bad AOL addresses. It's a pain to get on the list, but once you're on things go smoothly.
Why do people mark messages as spam that they willingly signed up for?
Several reasons. One is that the AOL user interface is pretty bad and it's easy to hit the button by accident.
Another is that people tend to select large swathes of messages in their inbox and mark them as spam in bulk, often mixing in the occasional legitimate email in the spam.
Another is that senders often don't make it clear enough who their email is from and the recipient clicks the This-Is-Spam button before they register that they really wanted it.
Another is that many people use the This-Is-Spam button as an Unsubscribe button, and click it when they don't want the email any more, rather than unsubscribing from the mailing list they signed up for. SpamCop gets used this way too.
(This all may or may not be related to the reason the mail was filed in the bulk folder, though. It was bulk email, the recipients hadn't whitelisted it... it's something of a crapshoot whether it'll get flagged as bulk in that case.)
Found this out in testing. We send messages to students enrolled in our program. I was initially bccing a large list. But places like Hotmail and Yahoo were marking them as spam.
My solution was to simply loop through the list of email addresses and send each student an individual message. A little more resource intensive, but since the messages are occassionally important for their their coursework(as opposed to the occassional "cookies in the lounge" type messages) we couldn't afford to have any messages marked as spam.
Problem was that the pager went off altogether too frequently, and my friend didn't care if there was a storm cell in -say- Flagler County, a hundred miles to the northeast. So he tried to unsubscribe, again and again and again... and those damned alerts just kept on comin'.
The list was really easy to get onto, but impossible to opt out of. My friend eventually had to change pagers to lose the things.
Moral: sometimes those broadcasts are solicited email that are no longer welcome, and there is no way to unsubscribe. I'd call that "spam": no-longer-solicited bulk email.
You must not value your time much. First off, I run a high volume mailing list/newsgroup/webforum that has been in operation since 1996. AOL is continually a problem, but nothing like recenetly
As of two weeks ago, all AOL and Compuserve subscribers were removed and the mailing list shut down to those domains.
1) They are not 'easy' to work with. My emails to 'postmaster' went unanswered despite their website saying it was a valid method.
2) Their 'feedback' loops, once you sign up, forwards to you the email that one of their users reported as SPAM. (never mind this is an opt-in w/ confirmation list). AOL strips the 'To' address so you do not know who to contact. It makes the feedback look useless for a mailing list. I have to spend a day or two configuring VERP to figure out who it was.
3) My entire domain got blocked because one AOL user hit 'Report this email as SPAM' a dozen times. It took 3 calls and 3 hours on the phone to resolve.
4) They do offer a 'whitelist'. However to sign up for the whitelist you must agree to their guidelines. http://postmaster.aol.com/tools/whitelist_guides.h tml
What BS is this? They want me to guarantee that my mailing list meets the AOL T&C?
'Any e-mail sent to AOL members must conform to AOL's Community Guidelines http://legal.web.aol.com/aol/aolpol/comguide.html'
5) The whitelist states that every email should have a physical address and contact phone number for unsubscribing. More BS.
'All subscription based e-mail must have valid, non-electronic, contact information for the sending organization in the text of each e-mail including phone number and a physical mailing address.'
They are currently content filtering emails too. Any member of my mailing list two posts a message containing a link to 'angelfire' or 'hotfire' domains are bounced. Entire digets are bounced because a users signature contains their angelfire homepage. I tried to modify the mailing list so that 'http://' was stripped, but AOL still rejected it. Some emails that only contained 'alturl.com' (kinda like tinyurl.com) are bounced.
Yes, that is what I did. However, this is very inefficient. Normally when you run a mailing list the same messages gets sent in one 'smtp' exchange with a mail server. Think of sending the same message to 50 recipients. Only one copy of the message is needed and you tell the AOL SMTP server the 50 recipients. Once you start having to 'personalize' each message, that one message needs to be sent 50 times to each recipients. A waste of time and bandwidth.