In an ongoing, and increasingly difficult, effort to ensure delivery of legitimate (non-SPAM) email newsletters from our customers to AOL subscribers, we signed up for AOL's SPAM reporting service. The purpose of the AOL system is to allow AOL subscribers to easily report messages that they think are SPAM (without requiring the AOL users to be educated as to what the definition of SPAM is). No problem - We're big proponents of smart ways to reduce SPAM as it's a problem for all Internet users. Unfortunately, the AOL system has some glaring flaws making it nearly worthless.

After beginning to receive these reports, one of our guys noticed a trend. We were getting as many as fifteen reports from one person for one email message. Moreover, we had a lot of double-reports from people complaining about the same email message.

How do I interpret these statistics?


Here's how:

  1. AOL does not place any limits on the number of times a user can click "Report SPAM". This effectively enables the user to become a SPAMmer themselves. Wonderful.

  2. AOL apparently does not trap double-clicks. This means that the not-so-Internet-savvy AOL users reporting SPAM who double-click the report button are submitting two-for-one SPAM reports. (See also point #1)


Why do I care?



  • Well, the main reason is that our customers care. Unfortunately, many of our customers actually have business customers who use AOL. Furthermore, some of our customers actually use AOL for personal and *UGH* business email service.

  • The second reason we care is that AOL actually uses this bogus information to judge how much of a SPAM risk email coming from your servers represents. AOL has really aggressive limits for what percentage of SPAM reports constitute "abuse" - According to one AOL operator we spoke with, the desired limit that allows you to get on their SPAM whitelist is < 0.1% of all emails getting flagged as SPAM. Clearly, if several click-happy AOL subscribers decide to "SPAM-report^15" you, you can exceed 0.1% percent pretty quickly. For that matter, a single AOL user has the power to knock you off of the AOL whitelist system.


Clearly, AOL needs to address this, or get out of the business of providing SPAM filtering for their email service. I would recommend that they cut a deal with a company like Postini and let folks that know how to handle SPAM (and what SPAM actually is) actually address it for them.

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