AOL Mail Problem

On Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 09:28:24AM -0700, chuck goolsbee
wrote:
 
> > I managed to get a whitelist on the domains in
> > question, which... unless you classify phpbb
notifications as "spam"
> > have never been even remotely associated with
spamming.
> 
> The fatal flaw in AOL's feedback system is that it is
user-generated, 
> and users will classify virtually anything as
"spam". It is actually 
> quite entertaining to skim the scomp feed... 

They have a very large user-base, though.

In my experience (though I haven't been dealing with this
as much in the
past year and a half or so), it takes a lot of user
complaints to
trigger any sort of block, and it's also based on the
percentage of
complaints to total mail. And that's only just one part of
their
blocking system.

> AOL may have clueless users, but AOL's postmaster
group has their
> feces amalgamated. I wish I could say the same for
Yahoo, Comcast,
> MSN/Hotmail, etc etc.

Exactly.

Keeping in mind that they are not only a huge email
provider, but also
that their user-base is mostly not exactly tech savvy, I
think Carl,
Charles et al do a pretty good job over there.

AOL was also one of the first big providers to publish their
mail
acceptance guidelines and to make a really big effort to
communicate
with mail senders. I remember sending a frustrated email to
the AOL
postmaster a few years back (when they were first starting
to do this)
in desparation over something or other (probably
backscatter), and being
surprised to actually get a response from an intelligent
human.

Dealing with their postmaster team can still take a while
sometimes, but
they'll generally respond.

w

On Thursday 27 Jul 2006 17:59, William Yardley wrote:
>
> Keeping in mind that they are not only a huge email
provider, but also
> that their user-base is mostly not exactly tech savvy,
I think Carl,
> Charles et al do a pretty good job over there.

I think Carl moved on to other things in AOL.

> Dealing with their postmaster team can still take a
while sometimes, but
> they'll generally respond.

Experience here is that they don't any more. I've got
responses, but not via 
postmaster.

They still do simplistic blocks on content, i.e. containing
certain types of 
content will cause a message to be rejected outright,
without any sort of 
consideration of the other content of the message. I think
that is a broken 
model.

Some sort of port 25 block, but neither a complete block,
nor guaranteed 
delivery, but some sort of intermediate proxy. This makes
life very hard on 
people who are learning about email, or coming from
elsewhere. I think what 
was needed was abuse detection and some sort of walled
garden approach, which 
could have dealt with all forms of abuse, not just email.

I appreciate changing anything at all on that sort of scale
is always 
tremendously challenging.

>>I think Carl,
>>  Charles et al do a pretty good job over there.
>
>I think Carl moved on to other things in AOL.

Correct.

>They still do simplistic blocks on content, i.e.
containing certain types of
>content will cause a message to be rejected outright,
without any sort of
>consideration of the other content of the message.

...and so will over half the mail systems on the wire today.
Welcome 
to the 21st century.


>I think that is a broken
>model.

Well, the *whole model* is broken. The old one, where we all
trusted 
one another, as well as all the various new ones where we
all try our 
best to deliver what our customers want while also blocking
what they 
don't.


The abusers are successfully killing the very system they
rely on, so 
I suspect that within a few years it will all be moot. In
the 
meantime, deal with it.


Have you requested whitelisting and a feedback loop with
them yet? If 
so, you wouldn't be having anything blocked.


--chuck goolsbee
digital.forest
seattle, wa