How does an Internet service provider protect its customers from spam without blocking legitimate e-mail? It's a tricky balancing act to be sure, but one thing my readers do agree on is that AOL's approach to the problem is clueless.
As one reader recently detailed, it seems that all it takes is a few "Clueless Ones" to erroneously report your message as spam to guarantee that AOL will periodically block all your e-mail to all AOL customers. Another reader reported: "We've seen the same nonsense, most recently yesterday when the Clueless One was a lawyer reporting the local Bar Association as a spammer for sending him a meeting notice. We regularly see people complaining about new baby pictures sent to them by family members. This is perhaps more an issue of dysfunctional families than AOL's spam policies, but somehow I don't think so. If AOL would include the complainer's e-mail address in the spam notification, it would be trivially easy to remove them from any lists we host or advise the sender that they don't want any more mail. Without the AOL member's e-mail address it is much more difficult to eliminate the source of the offending e-mail."
Any large e-mail list, no matter how thorough the opt-in procedures used in building it, is going to have a few Clueless Ones who forget they subscribed to it. "Even if you have confirmed opt-in consent there's no way to prove it, because AOL won't tell you who the complainant is. It gets kind of annoying; I've seen AOL users report our monthly, opt-in, confirmed e-mail postcard as spam, but also freelancers who accepted a gig from us then report our follow-up email (with travel info and the like) as spam. I understand that AOL is trying to reduce list washing, but getting an e-mail that boils down to 'some anonymous AOL member says you spammed them' is frustrating without being in any way useful."
Free websites like the car enthusiast list server that prompted the original gripe can't afford to pay a premium to deliver their e-mail. "Why should we have to increase our overhead to accommodate AOL's inability to actually confirm messages are spam before blocking us? We have thousands of AOL users who presumably are not flagging our messages -- couldn't AOL clue in that the messages didn't get matched for content, the sender has signed up to receive their notifications (for whatever reason, AOL doesn't just use the RFC ABUSE contact), the sender has promptly dealt with previous complaints and the thousands of other users they have aren't flagging the messages as spam? Dozens of users flagging a message would be an indication of a problem. One lone user flagging a dozen messages indicates an idiot who doesn't understand what they're doing."
Of course, AOL isn't the only ISP that sometimes blocks legitimate e-mail. "We are a website host with some 500 clients," wrote another reader. Many of these clients ask us to forward mail addressed to their domains to boxes at their ISPs. In addition to problems with AOL, which at least gives us the ability to get our mail servers delisted from their blacklist despite the rather onerous amount of time that it takes, we have experienced continuing problems with Comcast, which has no such procedure. As a result, we tell new clients that we will not forward email to Comcast accounts. We offer these clients the option of having a box on our server, at no additional charge, of course, or forwarding to another ISP. We tell established clients that we cannot guarantee that email forwarded from their domain will ever reach them, and offer them the same options."
But while AOL doesn't have a monopoly on Clueless Ones, it does seem to attract them. "I've had the exact problems with Clueless Ones on AOL," another reader wrote. "On a small announce-only list with only about 80 AOL users, one Clueless One was marking the messages as spam instead of following the instructions in each message to just reply with anywhere in the message. I had to send the next set of messages individually to each AOLer addressed as BCC so they would look the same as a list message but imbed a unique serial number in each message. AOL's spam report sends the body of the message but not the addressee. The serial number pinpointed the Clueless One and he was eliminated from the list. A lot of work to keep mail flowing to AOL. I will not take any AOLers any more to my lists. If the rest of the world would block AOL, that might get their attention."
Some readers are doing just that. "I help administer an e-mail reflector for ham radio operators," another reader wrote. "The site also hosts commercial and government lists. We had the same problem with AOL. Someone would register a complaint that they were being 'spammed' by our list, and the server would get blocked. Not just our reflector, but all email from this server, including the commercial and government lists. Obviously this cannot continue for long, as it affects the owner's commercial business. Since AOL would never tell us who was filing the complaints, it reached the point where AOL users had to be removed from the list and are no longer permitted to join. Not what we wanted to do, but since AOL couldn't be bothered to do anything more, what choice was there? We lost some list members; but we haven't had a problem since."
But one who isn't doing that yet is the original griper from the car enthusiast site, who I was able to put in touch with an AOL representative after that previous story appeared. "I'll have to temporarily curb my unabashed bashing of AOL knowing that someone at some level cares," the reader wrote. "The guy you put me in touch with said they haven't white listed us, but they've granted us a much higher report threshold. No charge. So the comparatively little guys with a Gripe Line megaphone have hopefully won the day. Time will tell."
I guess that's good news, but of course it would be even better if AOL came up with a spam blocking technique that doesn't impact so many legitimate senders. What's your suggestion? Post your comments on my website or write Ed Foster at [email protected].
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