[Mailman-Users] All AOL members not receiving emails

[Brad Knowles]

At 2:11 PM -0500 2004-08-31, John wrote:

>  Did AOL make some major change affecting Mailman a couple weeks ago?  I
>  have a Mailman 2.1.5 list with 46 AOL members, all of whom appear to
>  have stopped receiving list messages.

	AOL has a tendency to declare that sites are sending them spam 
and to start silently throwing all messages away that come from that 
site, sometimes on the basis of a single spam complaint from a single 
user.

	Sometimes, that user is a legitimate member of a mailing list 
from that site, and mistakenly clicked on the wrong message and 
clicked the "report as spam" button.  Sometimes that user doesn't 
remember subscribing to it, so they report the message as spam.  Or, 
sometimes the user doesn't remember how to unsubscribe, so they 
report the message as spam.


	There's not really anything you can do about this.  You are 
subject to the whims of the clueless AOL users and the occasional 
fat-finger mistake.

>  Is there some setting we need to tweak?  Have been running for years and
>  no problems other than the usual AOL spam controls getting tweaked without
>  the AOL subscriber's knowledge... but before it was always on a
>  case-by-case basis and we got bounces back...

	The best you can do is apply to be a member of the AOL whitelist 
system.  See <http://postmaster.aol.com/tools/whitelist_guides.html>.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.