AOL and NFN e-mail spam

AOL and NFN email spam

AOL has given their users a “button” to push on their e-mail interface to not only delete an e-mail but then automatically report it as spam. Many AOL users do not understand that “deleting” and “reporting as spam” are two distinct things, and consequently, they are reporting a lot of your legitimately sent e-mails as spam. As a result you may have gotten an e-mail from NFN Administration as follows:

Dear NFN User:

AOL has notified the NFN Administration that specific e-mails originating from your Naples Free-Net Account are being marked and reported as spam by the AOL user you are sending these e-mails to. The returned e-mail is shown below. Please note that the AOL user is the party responsible for reporting your e-mails as spam and that NFN has no control over AOL policy, programs, or AOL user actions.

The primary fault lies with the individual AOL recipient reporting your sent e-mail as SPAM to the AOL mail administration by clicking on their “Report Spam” button available within their AOL email program. (AOL WebMail has a “Report Spam” button. They need to just hit the “Delete” button, not the “Report Spam” button — see below link for details).

1) If you continue to send them e-mails, please make sure they are not reporting to the AOL mail system that your sent email is SPAM.
2) AOL does not release any information about their users, so if you do not know who you are sending the e-mails to, then NFN can not tell you who it is.
3) If the AOL recipient can be identified by you, please notify them not to classify your e-mails as spam. At stake is your e-mail address reputation, the e-mail reputation of NFN’s mail server, and e-mail spam filtering/reporting operations overall for AOL and NFN.

You may find it useful to have your AOL recipient take a look at this guideline:
http://faq.naples.net/2011/04/aol-user-e-mail-suggestions/

You should contact your AOL recipient and instruct them not to classify your e-mails as spam OR not be sending such e-mails to this AOL user. Continued sending of e-mails which the receiver is classifying and reporting to AOL as spam will result in AOL eventually globally blocking all e-mails originating from NFN Accounts because of perceived high spam volume. This, obviously, would inconvenience many of our NFN subscribers.

I emphasize that this is an AOL User action and an AOL policy implementation and is totally under AOL’s Administration control and/or the AOL subscriber account’s control. This does not mean that AOL thinks your email is SPAM, but rather, that the individual user you have sent to has clicked the “Report As Spam” button when they received your email. The other alternative is to remove this AOL user from your emailings. This might sound drastic, but if you don’t remove them and they continue to hit “Remove As Spam” button on their screen, then AOL will soon refuse to accept all mail from the Naples Free-Net, so you will not be able to send to them anyway.

Thank you for your attention to this matter and if you have any questions please contact the NFN Administration.

Regards,
NFN HelpTeam System/DSL Administration
Naples Free-Net http://home.naples.net
NFN DSL http://dsl.naples.net

The following is the AOL USER SPAM MARKED E-MAIL sent to the NFN Administration:
(the offending e-mail would appear at the end of the letter sent to you by the NFN administrator)

If you get this type of e-mail, let that AOL person know what they are doing. Train them to not just “delete” with the “Delete and Report as spam” button.

Now, were those e-mails you sent spam? They might think it to be junk, but did the AOL user bother doing the right thing to simply ask to be taken off your mailing list? No. What about the ones that were obviously not junk? When the AOL user incorrectly deletes your email then AOL counts that “spam” report against you, the sender, and the sender’s server (NFN’s email server).

Have your AOL recipient take a look at the “how to” at:
http://faq.naples.net/2011/04/aol-user-e-mail-suggestions/