AOL is blocking ALL of my emails to my clients as SPAM

AOL is blocking emails from my domain as SPAM

[gilahacker]

All emails from my domain (****.com) are being blocked as spam by AOL.

Our company NEVER sends unsolicited emails to anyone. We are a legitimate business and are having all kinds of trouble communicating with our customers.

I know we can have our customers add our email addresses to their address book and that will prevent our emails from being regarded as spam but that's a hassle (as we're dealing with multiple addresses) and looks unprofessional.

Our site works as such: people come to our site, they fill out our form, they get a thank you email... day or two later they get an automated followup email and there are a few semi-automated (we hit a button on the site and a canned email is sent to them) emails throughout the process (we do franchise consulting, sometimes this takes a few months)

It's not just the automated emails though... when we try to manually send emails our clients are telling us that they are also being dropped in their AOL spam folder...

I emailed AOL and got a response a few days later from some guy who doesn't have a great handle on english basically saying "sorry for the inconvenience but we're not going to do anything about it" and that I need to have my email provider (lunarpages?) contact AOL...

PLEASE HELP!

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 10:20 pm (utc) on June 9, 2004]
[edit reason] please no specifics. [/edit]

[robotsdobetter]

When AOL users get emails they "can" hit the report spam button and after a few times they do that AOL will block your emails. Also AOL has a hard time knowing what and what is not spam, your best bet is to contact your web hosting company to see if they will email AOL.

The problem with spam is that most of the time people that send spam only use the email address once, then they go create a new email at AOL or Yahoo and this leaves legitimate web sites in the cross fire to get BLAMED for.

[whoisgregg]

AOL publishes requirements for commercial mail sent to their members. You'll find that information by going to the "AOL Postmaster Info" site. They also have tools to determine exactly how they are blocking your e-mail (by mail server, IP range, or by content).

We have a problem where all our e-mail goes to an AOL customer's "Unknown Senders" mail box and even if they add our first e-mail addy to their "known senders" list, subsequent e-mails from different departments/individuals STILL go to the "Unknown Senders" box. Very frustrating...

Meanwhile, it's been our decision to temporarily ante up for an AOL account which we use to correspond with our customers who cannot provide an alternate e-mail address. (Yes, we ask our customers for a different address if they have AOL -- but we don't require it.)

[bcolflesh]

[postmaster.aol.com...]

[john_k]

In those guidelines, you will see Reverse DNS (or reverse PTR) mentioned. You can check yours at www.dnsstuff.com. You can also get a report as to whether or not you are being blacklisted by any of a long list of RBL services.

[bumpaw]

Ditto on tell your hosting service. I had the problem last week, and all the emails from one of my personal email accounts were bouncing when going to a friend with AWOL. The host solved it.

[AWildman]

Hey thanks for that link, John_K! That dnsstuff site is awesome!