Sally K Scheer wrote: > I'm not quite sure what you've just written here. What is AOL blocking? > If you only have a few people on your mailing list, probably nothing, but if you cross a certain threshhold--I'm guessing either number of messages sent from you, or number of spam complaints--AOL just starts rejecting your e-mail, and you have to sign up for their "Enhanced Whitelist" service, which is apparently being phased out in favor of Goodmail. Maybe this is not really an issue unless you have a "large" mailing list. My concern was that AOL could start looking at Precedence: list / bulk in the e-mail headers, and then numbers do not matter.
I have a client with an opt-in only newsletter that goes out monthly, you have to go to their website, subscribe to the list, and then confirm your subscription. Or you could fill out a paper form at one of their expos which clearly states that if you want to be on the newsletter mailing list, you should fill in your e-mail address. The list currently has about 45,000 subscribers, about 15,000 of those are from AOL, and as many as 100-200 people may sign up for or leave the list in an average month. Originally, it was more like 55,000, but when I took this on, I tuned the "bounce" settings to be more appropriate for a monthly "announce only" mailing list, peoples' bounce status was just getting reset too quickly. Sometime last year, AOL just started rejecting our e-mail, and I had to register them for the "Enhanced Whitelist" program so the e-mail would go to AOL subscribers. One thing that did do is that I started receiving e-mail from AOL every time someone reported the mailing as "spam" and then I would unsubscribe them from the list. People sign up for the list, confirm their subscription, and then turn around and complain about getting e-mail from us, and then when I take them off the list, they complain that they should not have been removed, I just don't get it. There is already a clear "Unsubscribe" link in our e-mail messages and we don't make people confirm unsubscription. It would be nice if AOL would give people a "Unsubscribe" button so hopefully people would use that instead of just being lazy and clicking the "Spam" button, the headers by Mailman already include the necessary information to do that. I would like to make it harder for people to subscribe and make people agree to some kind of "Terms of Service" but the client is afraid that will scare off technophobes, and I think there is a point to that. Since Enhanced Whitelist is supposedly being phased out and we are already on that program, I am wondering if AOL will just start rejecting our e-mail again unless we sign up for Goodmail. Jonathan ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.027.htp
