spam problems

[cellio]

This morning I received mail, forwarded by my email provider, from AOL. They were threatening to blacklist our entire domain because of a spam complaint (note use of the singular). I was getting this complaint because a single piece of spam was sent by some third party via a mailing list I own. So they were threatening to blacklist us, though we were only the vehicle. That's like going after the phone company because a telemarketer called you.

I've since fixed the mailing list to close that particular loophole, at some inconvenience to some list members. I also sent a message to the list saying, basically, be more careful in targetting your complaints. But it turns out it's only partially the fault of the list member who complained.

AOL makes it very easy for people to complain about spam, even if they didn't mean to. Apparently, the current UI is such that many people accidentally hit the "complain" button when they meant to hit the "delete" button. My sys admin told me of cases where AOL users "complained", presumably erroneously, about messages that they had sent. Talk about bad interface design! Quick, send them some experts in human-computer interaction! Heck, send them any intern from any HCI program.

AOL is huge, and they're certainly not going to investigate every spam complaint. Smaller providers can't afford to do so either. So they'll blacklist sites, usually temporarily, based on complaints, not on investigations. I think it's wrong to target hosts of mailing lists (absent reason to believe that they're being especially reckless), but I suppose this is how things work now. And it's going to get even worse now that the federal government has legalized spam and abolished state laws that limited it.

I'm not sure, but I might have liked it better when the uncertainty in email delivery came from the UUCP chain rather than from blacklists (and black holes). At least then everyone who was using email knew it wasn't necessarily reliable; now people just assume you're ignoring them. Sigh.

But all of this did finally prod me into learning enough about procmail tonight to set up some filtering on my own inbox. The spam has been getting a lot worse in recent months, up from 10-20 messages a day to more like 100. So I finally have candidate spam going to its own folder that I'll check in on from time to time. In the few hours it's been in place it's caught 23 pieces of spam, missed three pieces of spam, and caught no non-spam. So far, so good.

Comments

[kmelion.livejournal.com]

AOL has basically blocked all yahoo and hotmail accounts from reaching their users, which makes emailing my family a real PITA.

[chite.livejournal.com]

AOL really burns my ass.

In Mary Kay, consultants have an opt-in mailing list. If we add someone to our mailing list, MK sends out one message asking for permission to send them more messages. If they do not respond, or if they say no, MK will not allow us to send messages out to them.

AOL, however, has determined that MK consultants are spamming their customers when we send out email from the marykay domain, and they bounce them.

It would seem that there is nothing MORE right that MK could be doing.

[siderea]

Hey, are you still at That ISP[*]? They have spamassassin, which if you're not using in your procmail recipes, you should be. I was their Procmail User From Hell (900 lines of procmailrc, woohoo!) and would be happy to answer such questions as I can.

[* I'm not. I like my new shell provider much better.]

AOL's ludicrous spam policy

[(Anonymous)]

Given how much spam comes FROM AOHell addresses, you'd think they'd set their policies more carefully. Instead, a user accidentally clicking on block instead of delete can cause an entire domain to be shut out.

This happened to JTan (my shell/email/webhost provider) a few months ago. One Sunday morning I suddenly found I couldn't send email to my girlfriend, who is unfortunately still on AOL. Chris investigated, and discovered that JTan was blacklisted based on "complaints from users". After investigation, the best he was able to detemine wsa that some AOL idiot had signed up for a mailing list hosted on JTan, and then instead of unsubscribing started blocking...

I'm all for improving the user experience, to a point, but when you dumb it down so much that you HURT other people, you've done something wrong.