Dealing with False AOL Spam Reports? 371
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."
Whaaaat? Cluesless AOL users? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Whaaaat? Cluesless AOL users? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Whaaaat? Cluesless AOL users? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, at one point they might have opted in, but people forget or get tired of getting your newsletters or even the occasional guilty-by-association of simply looking like a professional email (as in, from a company) instead of a personal email.
So don't bash AOL users ... for this reason anyway. ;)
Unsubscribing Much Better Now (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
Re:Whaaaat? Cluesless AOL users? (Score:5, Funny)
A Short Flaccid Penis
A High Mortgage Rate
High Insurance Rates
A Hugh Amount of Debt
No Online Diplomas
Does Not work from home..
Re:Whaaaat? Cluesless AOL users? (Score:2, Troll)
Re:Whaaaat? Cluesless AOL users? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not your fault - you're dealing with AOL (Score:4, Insightful)
AOL is quite reasonable (Score:5, Informative)
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!)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:AOL is quite reasonable (Score:5, Informative)
forward DNS: mail.yourdomain.com -> 192.168.1.1
Woody
Re:AOL is quite reasonable (Score:2)
It is important that your mail server has a reverse lookup that resolves to a name where a postmaster can be contacted. It is also a very good idea, to have that name also forward resolve to the same IP (even if other names also resolve to that same IP).
Re:AOL is quite reasonable (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:AOL is quite reasonable (Score:5, Informative)
Re:AOL is quite reasonable (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Opt-in spam? (Score:3, Informative)
Staples = Spammers (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
Re:AOL is completely UNREASONABLE. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:AOL is completely UNREASONABLE. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:AOL is completely UNREASONABLE. (Score:3, Insightful)
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 ba
Re:AOL is completely UNREASONABLE. (Score:3, Insightful)
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 wors
Re:AOL is completely REASONABLE. (Score:3, Interesting)
I have this same problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I have this same problem (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I have this same problem (Score:2)
Re:I have this same problem (Score:2, Informative)
Is it really so hard for *your* ISP to filter these before they pollute someone else's network? You ISP's mail server should be filtering for these, and they should be blocking outbound port 25 from clients unless specifically requested by the client.
I have no problem with folks sending their own mail out if they know what they're doing, and they specifically request it. But I have a HUGE pr
Re:I have this same problem (Score:2)
I have no control of *my* ISP's policies and no choice in my area.
You asked.... (Score:5, 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.
DoggYou need your own AOL account for QA (Score:3, Insightful)
no chance for us... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:no chance for us... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:no chance for us... (Score:4, Interesting)
The implications are that the message is not delivered *IMMEDIATELY*, but it will get there... just late.
Incredibly stupid mistake (Score:2)
Seriously a spam report is the least of AOL's problem. As soon as the rest of the internet noobs figure out how to use the internet via a regular ISP, AOL is history.
My email never gets blocked by AOL (Score:5, Funny)
Lucky clients... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Lucky clients... (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [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?
Something that might help... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
it is a tough situation (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:it is a tough situation (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:it is a tough situation (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Had the same problem... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
SourceForge mailing lists are blocked by AOL (Score:5, Interesting)
I submitted a support request [sourceforge.net] to SF about it, and they said (rightfully) that it is AOL's problem.
Re:SourceForge mailing lists are blocked by AOL (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:SourceForge mailing lists are blocked by AOL (Score:3, Insightful)
100% blocks all spam (Score:2)
If they block 100% of messages, there will be NO spam.
That's a better spam blocking percentage than even whitelisting since trusted senders might turn bad.
Re:SourceForge mailing lists are blocked by AOL (Score:3, Funny)
Re:SourceForge mailing lists are blocked by AOL (Score:3, Interesting)
AOL is it's own little world on purpose thats what they sell. Persoanly I have never had issues with sending mail to AOL it's simply a matter of using smarthosts at home and normal configuration at work.
AOL almost knows me by name.... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's pointless trying to talk to anyone in aol (Score:2, Interesting)
At some point in my history... I was using pine, and sending mail. I set name using chfn "first I last", though my memory could be foggy and it could have been "first I. last". This wasn't a problem for any mail server except for AOL... for some reason it wouldn't parse correctly and try to send mail to "first I@domain.com"
Dispite honest efforts trying to get a hold of the mail staff, by my self and my isp... at no point was it possible to actually report the problem to anyone.
The final solution was ju
My experience... (Score:5, Interesting)
This happened to me. (Score:4, Interesting)
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!
EmailOK field (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
solution (Score:2)
&RejectAddress();
}
Re:solution (Score:2, Informative)
Maybe you meant
Accidental spam reports, eh? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
misc (Score:2)
But this is nothing. I run a mail server and I set up accounts which auto forward to AOL accounts. The users would spread their address everywhere, and when spammers would spam it, it would forward to AOL and they'd mark it as junk, and AOL would block ME since *I* sent it to them - makes
You're F***ed. (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Don't mail them - and tell the users why (Score:2, Interesting)
A human is a lousy spam filter (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:A human is a lousy spam filter (Score:3, Informative)
Just don't send email to AOL users (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Simple solution (Score:2)
Quit sending AOL accounts email. Tell them that the daily/weekly/monthly newsletter is on the web site, they want to read it, vist the site.
Simple, no?
fax or mailout? (Score:2, Funny)
Issues with AOL and email (Score:3, Informative)
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
Small lists too... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Small lists too... (Score:3, Interesting)
Save their agreement (Score:2)
AOL is unaccountable for blocking (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Yahoo can lock users out too (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Double Opt-In is a meaningful term (Score:4, Insightful)
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"
This drives me, and my customers nuts (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:This drives me, and my customers nuts (Score:2)
My bitch about AOL (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Some Practical Advice (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Affecting my university (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Standard practice at AOL (Score:4, Funny)
Discourage AOL usage (Score:2)
They usually blow me off until the third or fourth time they call wondering why they haven't received their weekly status report at wh
The other side (Score:2)
I've tried to get my ISP to unblock the posts, but as a subscriber I have no standing to make a formal request. The list master says they get no bounce messages, which the ISP requires postmasters to send them in order to get off the block list.
Wh
remember kids (Score:2)
Spam is not something you do not like, it's getting something you has no dealing with.
Don't like? don't agree to the service.
Once again proving that spam is not as bad as people make it out to be. The problem is lack of user knowledge and education.
Re:remember kids (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:remember kids (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Oh man don't get me started on this... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Oh man don't get me started on this... (Score:3, Insightful)
A simple cron job to parse all user website directories for formail.cgi and formail.php scripts which then rm -f'd the offending script, and logged which web site contained the script.
We would then send an email to all the customers caught
Yahoo did the same thing. (Score:2)
Very annoying to have no confirmation prompt at ALL when you are sending 50 messages at once to the spam processor... It really is a bad UI decision. And once i
I am going to invoice AOL for their shit (Score:2, Funny)
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.
nobody ever marked an rss feed as spam (Score:2, Informative)
The best opt-in I've ever seen is an RSS [socialtext.net] 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 [useit.com] by crying "spam" to CloudMark etc... Go cry to mommy that they accidentally marked your carefully crafted newsletter as spam. G
Yeah Right. (Score:2)
if people are accidently marking your emails as spam, odds are they thought it was spam for a reason in the first place. Even if later they changed their mind.
Joseph Elwell.
on accident? (Score:3, Interesting)
...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...
ISP Standpoint (Score:3, Informative)
Give users what they want (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:User's don't report Spam on accident.... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
So did I (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:On accident? (Score:5, Informative)
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?
Hey retard (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Hey retard (Score:2)
Re:Wow (Score:3)
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.
Re:Take the hint (Score:2)
Playing nicely with AOL (Re:Take the hint) (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Take the hint (Score:2)
Uh, it is in fact 'too hard' when you never get a notification from AOL that person 'x' thinks your mail is spam, or any notification from AOL at all. Just one day your IP goes over the magic limit of complaints and you get kicked out of AOL's mail servers.
Unless you mean unsubscribing all AOL users, but if you're just going to avoid sending AOL users any mail at all, why do you care whether y