azurelunatic | (no subject)

It's not just AOL. It's also Yahoo, and some company called Goodmail (apparently named via the same logic as "Greenland").

Motherfucker.

I'm about to be fired from one of my jobs due to AOL's repeated blacklistings of the mailserver. Its taken 3 requests and 8 phonecalls to get the spam feedback loop setup so I can actually see what the hell is going on,and discover that someone is using bounced NDRs to spam AOL from our mailserver. Its fixed now, but their screwups may just have cost me a job.

Jesus.

Yeh. This latest round I FINALLY learned why they've blacklisted us 4 times in the last 6 months so I can actually DO something about it.

So now I have to start working on a list of talking points for my POC there(who doesn't want to get rid of me) to use when the leadership meets again and someone brings up the "Well, there's this new nonprofit focused IT group in town, why don't we talk with them? I'm sure they can get our mail to AOL." point again, she can have some ammunition to say "hey, here's what we used to have before, and what benefits we've had with

crisavec running our network over the last 3 years."

Good luck.

They've completely misunderstood what this is about. It's not going to affect normal random people - it's essentially a way for companies to bypass part of AOL's spam filters (and appear in AOL mail with a little 'AOL think these guys are legit' sign), in return for paying money and agreeing not to be a prick.

It won't affect email to friends and so on, unless you have a tendency to email AOL-using friends with messages like 'YOU HAVE BEEN SELECTED AS A WINNER!!!' - in which case they were never seeing the email anyway.

It still looks to me like getting bribed by spamlords to have open, easy, and publicly recognized access to a whole bunch of sitting ducks.

More like getting bribed by Dell or MS - regardless, that's not what the site you linked to was complaining about. They've misunderstood what AOl et al are actually doing.

If the new policy results in AOL users getting a couple hundred Certified Legit By AOL unsolicited commercial offers a day, it *will* affect email to friends by the simple expedient of making REAL emails invisible in the flood of junk.

And since AOL and Yahoo are among the biggest email providers around--if they get away with doing it, soon *everyone* will have a similar policy. Which means that eventually even those of us who don't use AOL etc. will be affected.

But regardless, it's a policy specifically intended to *increase* the amount of spam people have to deal with. And as such, it should be fought tooth and nail. (Hell, I'm offended by the USPS rate discounts for dead-tree junk mailers for much the same reason.)

IIRC, the logic they're putting forward is that legitimate companies that pass vetting can avoid otherwise overly-aggressive spam-filters. I can see how this could have positive side-effects: the companies that pass the vetting will have to make it easy for people to remove themselves from the distribution lists.

Obviously the main reason is as a source of revenue, and it's Evil AOL, etc, etc - but I think what you're talking about is pure hyperbole.

Three-quarters of the discussion I've seen on this issue has had the facts wrong in various ways.

I think the results of this will depend a lot on just what requirements they use to make companies proove that they're legitimate. To actually be legitimate, the companies would have to be using opt-in mailing lists, not spamming. "Commercial mail" does not equal "spam". If they're greedy, which AOL has certainly been known to be, they may not make that requirement. If they don't, then they're setting up a system to allow spamming, not to help deal with it.

As it is, AOL's "spam filters" block many legitimate messages from delivery. Some of the statistics I've seen indicate that up to a third of legitimate messages sent to AOL users don't get delivered. Having legitimate mail that users want get through those spam filters would be a good thing. I just plain don't trust AOL though, nor Yahoo. (I've never heard of Goodmail before this.)My guess is that this will have bad results, just not quite in the way that various people are up in arms about.

*nods* Exactly.

I wonder what legal side-effects it might have if they take money from people who are effectively spammers, given that most countries now have legislation making it possible to prosecute spammers. If they're taking money from people, their various legal departments might feel obliged to make their vetting be decent, simply to avoid AOL et al being the target of anti-spam lawsuits and/or criminal action (which they might be able to win in court, or at the very least would be able to afford to pay the fines - but it would be absolutely terrible PR).