At 11:24 AM 03/22/2001, you wrote: >I am receiving an increasing number of complaints from our AOL customers >that they are not receiving the emails that we send out. We use ListServ >with the mail-merge feature to generate daily update emails to our >customers. I have checked the SQL statement and verified that they are >included and have checked the bounce log file and verified that they were >not bounced. I am not really sure what to do. Is anyone else experiencing >this same problem? Does anyone have any suggestions? > >Lenny Lenny: At CharityChannel we have been getting similar complaints. Some AOL customers are not receiving some CharityChannel messages -- it's very intermittent and isn't (apparently) affecting all our AOL-based subscribers. The following information may or may not be related: It''s not just our imagination! AOL's spam filters are indeed blocking legitimate mail: http://computerworld.com/cwi/story/0,1199,NAV47_STO58808_NLTpm,00.html From the article: ----------------------------------- "In a statement today, an AOL spokesman, said the filtering software mostly did its job; it blocked spam. "One of our top priorities is protecting our members from spam, and as part of that effort, our system automatically shields our members from those servers that are sending significant volumes of spam. A small percentage of EarthLink servers fell into that category, but we've worked with EarthLink, and that issue has been resolved," he said. EarthLink's servers weren't the only ones blocked, the spokesman said. The software monitors all Internet e-mail coming into AOL." ------------------------------ We reported this problem to AOL support when it was first reported to us several weeks ago. [The AOL customer contacted customer support, who said that we (as the mailer) had to report the issue. So we did.] Thus far, no response. I don't know what can be done. AOL has a legitimate interest in protecting its subscribers against spam, and it needs to configure its spam filters in such a way that legitimate e-mail gets through. I'm sometimes tempted to advise my subscribers to use another service or account, but we have a LOT of AOL subscribers. Also, as I said, they do have a point about needing to block spam. I wonder if L-Soft has has any recent (or not-so-recent) contact with AOL on this? M I C H A E L L. W Y L A N D Chief Operating Officer CharityChannel.com ________________________________________ CharityChannel LLC Midwest Office: 818 South Hawthorne Avenue Sioux Falls, South Dakota 57104-4537 (605) 334-1103 (877) 7-CHARITY toll-free [log in to unmask]