[OPLINTECH] AOL and mass emailings survey

[Karen Perone]

There was quite a lively discussion about this on the Innovative Users 
Group list recently. Here is one of the responses - HTH.
--Karen Perone, Rodman Public Library

     * Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 19:47:32 -0500
     * From: "Ostrom, Kriss" <kriss@mail.lib.msu.edu>
     * Subject: Our servers were blocked by AOL!

At MSU, our university-affiliated borrowers must use their Michigan 
State University mail accounts for e-mail, however, some of them forward 
to AOL accounts. In addition, as part of our interpretation of our 
land-grant mission, we offer free borrowing privileges to any adult 
resident of the state of Michigan, many of whom have asked us to send 
circ notices to their AOL accounts.

Recently, our bounced mail contained many bounces from AOL addresses, 
with this message:

The information presently available to AOL indicates this
<<< 554-server is generating high volumes of member complaints from AOL's
<<< 554-member base. Based on AOL's Unsolicited Bulk E-mail policy at
<<< 554-http://www.aol.com/info/bulkemail.html AOL may not accept further
<<< 554-e-mail transactions from this server or domain. For more 
information,
<<< 554 please visit http://postmaster.info.aol.com


This type of block occurs because AOL users have specifically reported 
our e-mail notices as spam, probably without even opening/reading them. 
(Funny, since you'd think they can read, having checked out books to 
read! ;-) )

I thought this might happen to one of you, so I will share the correct 
phone number (which will save you a lot of time and transfers). Call the 
"AOL Postmaster Team" at 888.212.5537.

We solved this problem for mail coming from the library server by AOL 
"whitelisting" our IP address. However, the most recent AOL-bounced circ 
e-mail is not coming from our III server. They are coming from another 
campus server, which makes me think these folks might have their MSU 
e-mail accounts forwarding to their AOL addresses. So the problem has 
been referred on to Computer Center staff who handle the mail servers on 
campus ...

Greg Syferd wrote:
> Just wondered if any of you out there were having the same kind of
> issues with AOL and/or other ISPs.  I think we are pretty limited in our
> options in dealing with AOL, but maybe some of you have had some luck or
> are processing your mass emailings differently.