[Tracker-discuss] Fwd: Abuse Message [AbuseID:025FD3:14]: AbuseAOL: Email Feedback Report for IP 88.198.142.26

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Izak Burger writes:

 > Someone at AOL thinks a password reset message is spam. Any ideas on how 
 > this happened?

This is very common with AOL.  First (most likely in this case) AOL
puts the SPAM button right next to the DELETE button, and AFAIK
there's no feedback to the user making it inconvenient to miss.  From
the user's point of view, they both just make the message disappear.
I suppose the confirmation message is a little bit different, but I
don't read those messages from my MUAs.  I don't suppose anyone reads
them at AOL, either, unless they didn't want to delete the message.

Second (probably not applicable to someone with a Python tracker
account, though), that's the user base that AOL targets: ignorant and
loving it.  Many AOL users apparently think of any unwanted mail as
spam, even if they requested it themselves and later changed their
minds.

Third, it could be a joe job: somebody who doesn't like the user
signed them up for a bunch of mailing lists.  I've also heard rumors
of bots doing this to grab email addresses out of the list traffic,
but that seems pretty perverse, even for a bot, when it's so easy to
create a throwaway account that won't upset anybody somewhere and sign
that up.