Forum Moderators: phranque
What was even more surprising was that AOL was leading the way in bounce backs at a rate that was 3 times higher than Hotmail and Yahoo whom you would expect a lot of fake email addresses from. 26% of everyone we removed from our list in the last month was a bounce back with an @aol.com email address.
I do not think we are having problems with AOL spam filters becuase we use a larger direct email company to send these, and the biggest portion of the AOL accounts we are losing are from 2001 and 2002 and they have definitely gotten more than 3 emails sent to them because they would have fallen off this list a long time ago.
It is no secret that AOL is losing subscribers to broadband on the high end and United Online (Juno/NetZero) on the low end. Given that AOL has such a large market share and that AOL was one of the earliest mass market ISPs, a lot of sites are going to lose a both a large number of user emails and their older (potentially more valuable) emails.
Has anyone else seen this trend in action? I would like to know if we are the only one seeing this, or if anyone else has seen this. If some one has been following this over time, has it been getting worse and at what rate?
Send a message w/a missing or malformed header and it goes straight to /dev/null.
Or maybe your subscribers from AOL are just too static :)
Regards,
Brent
That means it is not primarily a spam filter issue if AOL could not find users for 76% of accounts.
At this point it is a matter of figuring out of the 19 bad emails what % ever successfully got anything from us and what % never did. This should help clear up the question of whether these emails were ever valid to begin with.
Interesting point about multiple identities under one account. They could just be working through different names. Who knows...
I did read the other day that AOL expects to lose 1 million users this year, so there is some credence to my intial suspicion.
Again does anyone out there have first hand experience with high bounce back rates from AOL email addresses?
That means in 9 months time, bad AOL address removals have almost doubled for us, having gone from 14% of list removals in July 02 to 26% of list removals in Mar 03.
In my mind this supports the idea that people are fleeing AOL, and that this flight is hurting our ability to communicate with our members.
AOL is also testing anti-spam measures now so expect to see more fallout. There was a link to an article here about what AOL is doing to cut down on spam but I can't locate it.
[webmasterworld.com...]
We are having the same problem with AOL. We have about 12,000 AOL names in our opt-in newsletter. We would previously get between 10-15% bounce. The last few months we are seeing between 70-80% bounce.
We have gone to extreme lengths to make sure our headers are as clean and proper formed as possible. We also make sure most of the other i's are dotted like reverse DNS, no open relays, yada, yada.
According to some people, if you send X number of emails into AOL during a 12 hour period, you are considered a spammer by default unless you are on their whitelist. I don't know what that X number is, but we are under the impression that this is our problem because we seem to get the majority of the first few thousand through just fine, then extreme bounces.
Warlord, try taking some of your bounces and send them one at a time from your personal email and see if any of them get through.
Our situation might be a little unique too because our member base is just getting married or got married so they might be prone to changing a lot of things in their life, including where they live, which means their ISP, and their email address.
One way or the other, given that so many damn people use (or used) AOL, having them either change ISPs or having AOL really up their bulk mail protection makes for major headaches in trying to get newsletters to people.
