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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 used to get filtered out by a few places -- mainly because I send from a Comcast owned IP address, and SPEWS although well intentioned, is monolithic and draconian, and flags ALL comcast IP addresses. I'm not complaining (too much) -- drastic times called for drastic measures. However, since I implemented Domain Keys (and probably more importantly since Yahoo! implemented it) I have not had a "your server is bad" email bounce.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
I'm surprised some enterprising sort hasn't created a blacklist for use by mailing list operators that tracks the likelihood of a domain's customers illegitimately reporting valid mail as spam. Then, newsletter admins could use that score as a guideline to how many hoops a would-be subscriber has to jump through before getting added to the list.
Coming in from a private domain that's never mis-reported ham as spam? Your reply to the confirmation email is enough to subscribe you. Signing up from moron.com with a mis-reporting likelihood of 35%? You can't subscribe until your mailserver admins have also acknowledged a confirmation message explaining what you're asking for and that you've already explicitly asked to do it.
Hmmm, I've been looking for a new project to start...
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
There is a better solution to your problem.
How about you set your mailbox filter to rely on a header rather than a subject tag? If using spamassassin, filter on "X-Spam-Status: yes" rather than whatever markings happen to be in the subject line. The forward (depending on the mail client) ought not to contain this same header.
This is also good practice to use on mailing lists too. Mailman and the like generally include X-Been-There headers. Filtering on this header instead of the subject line has all kinds of benefits such as personal responses to your postings on the list do not get stuffed into the list's mailbox, etc.
The parent is the most complete and insightful comment so far on this topic.
To elabotrate (not attempt to half-sole), those of us who understand IT often grossly overestimate the average email/web user. I'd estimate that 90 percent of the people I know who use email are clueless about EVERYTHING. Click this, read email. Click this, delete email. Click this, send email. Click this, block email. That's the extent of their knowledge. Most probably think an IP address is the location of a public restroom, and believe Internet Explorer IS "the internet." And I'd bet that a huge chunk of them have at one time or another bought something through a spamvertized website.
Trying to educate them is hopeless--I know, I've tried. The best thing we can do is send as many as possible TO AOL, not try to lure them away from it. The protections AOL has in place makes knowledgeable users cringe, but they also protect the rest of us from clueless users, and those users from each other and themselves.
I say go AOL, go!
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.