Word to the Wise

In a blog post on April 28, AOL pointed to their new Sender Best Practices document. These are not things a sender must do in order to get mail delivered to AOL, but rather things that will help improve your reputation at AOL.

The recommendations are what I have been recommending for a while and there is nothing overly surprising in the recommendations.

• Send mail users want and expect
• Separate your mail streams
• Suggest recipients add the From: address to their address book
• Make it easy for recipients to unsubscribe
• Minimize your invalid users
• Use DKIM to authenticate email

All of these are good suggestions for sending any email to any recipient

This also adds AOL to the list of ISPs supporting DKIM. If you are not yet signing with DKIM, you should be planning the deployment path to signing.

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Denise Cox has a list of 10 things your signup page should have over on her blog.

The AOL postmaster blog has its first post up talking about bounces.

BeRelevant has a great blog with lots of suggestions email best practices.

Mark Brownlow had a great post this weekon moving the unsubscribe button to the top of your newsletter to make it easy for customers to unsubscribe. The comments are a must read as well, including one commenter that saw the number of ‘this is spam’ hits go down when he moved the unsubscribe link to the top of the email.

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AOL announced today they are launching a postmaster blog http://journals.aol.com/pmtjournal/blog/

I’ll be updating the blogroll, too. I’ve been checking out some new delivery / marketing blogs the last few weeks.

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AOL is looking for input from ISPs and ESPs to better understand how you handle data sent to you by AOL.

In regards to bounces - users unknown, specifically - could you please explain the following:

ESPs:
When do you take action on clients because of bounces? What is your threshold for acceptable, and not? Do you have an escalating level of punishment for people who break your thresholds?

ISPs:
What is your threshold for “acceptable” in regards to inbound mail streams and “users unknown”? What do you do when that threshold is breached?

You can send answers to me directly (laura-blog (at) wordtothewise.com) and I will forward them to the folks at AOL. You can also post them in the comments and I will make sure the AOL folks see the answers.

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Sources tell me that AOL announced on yesterday’s ESPC call that they are now, and have been for about a week, checking DKIM inbound. This fits with a conversation I had with one of the AOL delivery team a month or so back where they were asking me about what senders would be most concerned about when / if AOL started using DKIM.

The other announcement is that AOL, like Yahoo, would like to know how you categorize your outgoing mail stream as part of the whitelisting process.

Both of these changes indicate to me that AOL will be improving the granularity of their filtering scheme. DKIM signing will let them separate out different domains and different reputations across a single sending IP address. The categorization will allow AOL to evaluate sender statistics within the context of the specific type of email. Transactional mail can have different statistics from newsletters from marketing mail. Better granularity means that poor senders will be less able to hide behind good senders. I expect to hear some wailing and gnashing of teeth about this change, but as time goes on senders will clean up their stats and their policies and, as a consequence will see their delivery improve everywhere, not just AOL.

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Earlier this week a question came up on a mailing list. The questioner recently started seeing an increase in rejections to @aol.com addresses. These rejections said

<redacted@aol.com>: host mailin-03.mx.aol.com[205.188.109.56] said: 550 We would love to have gotten this email to redacted@aim.com. But, your recipient never logged onto their free AIM Mail account. Please contact them and let them know that they’re missing out on all the super features offered by AIM Mail. And by the way, they’re also missing out on your email. Thanks. (in reply to RCPT TO command)<redacted@aol.com>

The poster was confused because the addresses were aol.com addresses that had successfully delivered in the past. He was unsure why AOL would be rejecting good aol.com addresses with the aim.com.

After some investigation and some discussion with a friendly AOL representative, the underlying reason for this sudden increase in rejections became clear. The mailer was seeing an increase for two interacting reasons.

1. When an AOL user abandons their account, AOL converts the account to a free aim.com address. That is why the aol.com addresses were getting the aim.com rejection.
2. The marketing group at the company who saw the rejections “dug deep into their database” and sent mail to a number of addresses that had not received email in a while.

The increase in bounces is the result of pulling older addresses and the @aol.com addresses getting @aim.com bounces is the result of AOL’s policy of converting abandoned aol addresses to aim addresses.

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A number of ISPs have email information and postmaster sites available. I found myself compiling a list of them for a client today and thought that I would put up a list here.

• AOL: http://postmaster.info.aol.com/
• Juno/Netzero/UnitedOnline: http://www.unitedonline.net/postmaster/
• MSN/Hotmail: http://postmaster.msn.com/Services.aspx
• RoadRunner: http://security.rr.com/spam.htm
• Spamcop: http://www.spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/94.html
• Yahoo: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/

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The recent layoffs at AOL did affect the AOL Postmaster desk, and information I have received is that there was significant loss. As a result of the staff decrease, some changes have been made to the whitelisting and FBL processes. In order for a FBL to be approved it must meet the new FBL guidelines. In a nutshell, anyone wanting to get a FBL from AOL must meet ONE of the following criteria.

• The reverse DNS for each IP shares the FBL domain.
• At least one authoritative nameserver for each IP shares the FBL email domain.
• The IP WHOIS information for each IP shares the FBL email domain in common. The domain may appear in any of the listed email addresses.
• The ASN WHOIS information for each IP shares the FBL email domain in common. The domain may appear in any of the listed email addresses.

These are not exactly new policies, some version of them have always been in place. The intent of the checks is to make sure that people only get the FBLs for IP ranges that belong to them. In the past, the checks were done by hand by the folks on the postmaster desk. With the massive decrease in staff, these checks have been automated.

A few people have complained about the new checks and the fact that their applications were denied. The good news is there are escalation paths and ways to get decision makers to take a look at the application. Also, the process is being tweaked so that everyone who should get a FBL does actually get one.

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Ken Magill comments on the reaction of truthout.org to being blocked by AOL and Hotmail.

I do agree with Al, if both AOL and Hotmail are blocking your email, then you’re doing something wrong.

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