[Mailman-Users] AOL redacts user addresses even with VERP and full personalization enabled

[Dave (FitEyes)]

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 6:51 PM, William Yardley
<mailman at veggiechinese.net>wrote:

> On Sat, Jun 16, 2012 at 11:58:46PM -0500, Lindsay Haisley wrote:
> > I have no idea why AOL wants to make it difficult for list
> > administrators to unsubscribe people who don't want to be subscribed
> > and who complain to AOL about list posts being spam.
>
> To prevent listwashing or retaliation, for one thing, and also to
> protect (to some extent) their users' privacy. I think the point of the
> FBL is more to alert you to problems on your network, than to assist you
> in listwashing. Yes, people will click the "report spam" link by
> accident occasionally, but probably not often enough to get you flagged
> as a spam source if your lists are genuinely legitimate, and use a
> closed-loop confirmation process.
>

Is this true? We had one AOL member flag almost 50 of our list's messages
as spam today. This person joined us in December 2011. He/she joined via
the website and confirmed via email, but then he didn't actively post to
the list and we didn't hear a single thing from him/her until today --
then, wham, almost 50 abuse reports from this one person today.

We unsubscribed the person today.

Do today's 50 abuse reports really have insufficient power to damage our
reputation?

Could this person continue to mark large numbers of our lists messages as
spam without it affecting our reputation or our ability to deliver to AOL
users who want to receive our messages? Before we figured out how to
identify and remove such people, they would just continue to mark our
messages as spam every single day. That won't hurt our reputation over time?



I haven't been on an AOL FBL for a long time, but does the munging in
> question remove the queue-ID and message-ID? Otherwise, it should be
> very simple to find the subscriber by looking at your own logs.
>


That's what we are doing now. But it is only possible if you VERP every
message and have accessible logs. There was earlier discussion about the
fact that these abuse reports can relate to very old messages and those
logs may have been archived or removed.