Aol Spam Policy

I run am the webmaster for a site with a large user database. Recently we were banned by our Host from sending emails. I looked into it and found out there were too many complaints from AOL. After some more research I found out AOL has a blacklist, and a white-list. If your site sends out too many emails in bulk to AOL members, AOL, actually aol (don’t like them enough to capitalize them) will blacklist you, contact your host, and tell them you are spamming.

Our site only sends out emails to users who have signed up for your membership based website, and who click on the “Agree to terms” box when they sign up. aol however doesn’t care about this stuff. They make you sign up for a feedback loop email, and then apply to get on their whitelist. I can understand how this would be useful for unsolicited sites sending mail, but what about us with solicited sites? Well tough luck. Is their method 100% guaranteed you won’t get in trouble (for doing nothing wrong I might add)? NO!

The problem: Users can still in their aol inbox click that an email sent was spam. If there are enough people clicking that button, aol will contact your host with a spam complaint.

Solution: I think we are going to have to delete all aol accounts, and tell users that they can’t sign up for our site using and email account, and then have a link to gmail or something. Obviously aol hasn’t thought this all the way through.

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 9th, 2006 at 6:15 pm and is filed under Just Talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.