On 6/19/07, Eric Thomas <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

[ Massive snippage to get to ... ]

> 3. My ONLY option is to apply for whitelisting, which requires receiving spam reports (which in itself is a good thing).

We have a small server with a few hobby lists, one of which is 'big'
at about 1200 subscribers.  The admins (who do this as a hobby) looked
at getting on AOL's whitelist, but found the requirements too onerous.
 See specifically bullet item 5 under E-mail Formatting Requirements:
at http://www.postmaster.aol.com/whitelist/whitelist_guides.html.
We are NOT going to put physical address & phone number of our admins
in our email.  I do realize that a commercial or educational
institution can do that, but as a hobby list, it just isn't going to
happen.

We don't have the budget for anything more that a basic ListServ
license, and don't want to spend the processing time to mailmerge the
subscribers' names into a footer for the (thankfully infrequent for
us) occasion when an AOL subscriber accidentally reports a message as
spam.  We do have an AOL feedbackloop, and by setting our AOL members
to use the FULL822 header, I can manually find out who did the
reporting.  That doesn't work for digests, but we only have a few AOL
members getting our list in digest form.

I well and truly hope that the work Lsoft is doing makes it possible
for the larger list providers to keep mail flowing to AOL, and I wish
I could participate in making the process work. (I also wish we had
the budget to upgrade to version 15, and 15.5.  We accidentally let
the one year after our 14.5 purchase go by without upgrading to V15
:-(  This is a hobby list, and the admins have other jobs)

I'm afraid, though, that AOL is completely unreceptive to any outside
forces that want to make list email to AOL members work better.

<screaming rant on>AOL is run by idiots, who think their subscribers
are even more stupid than they are. <screaming rant off>  Sometimes,
they are even correct.

Best Wishes to Eric, LSoft, and List Admins that have to deal with
hundreds or thousands of AOL members on their lists.  I appreciate the
opportunity for me, as a representative of a very small operation to
participate in the discussion.

-- 
David Phillips
Molon Labe !
Moved from CARY, NC, the Containment Area for Relocated Yankees
Settling in near  36° 08' 25" N , 80° 17' 21" W while building around
36° 08' 47" N , 80° 19' 23" W
Lose Not A Minute!