Taken from the postmaster blog. Anyone having delivery issues due to this? New Spam Filtering Posted May 6th 2013 2:41PM by Lili Crowley Hello - Based on customer feedback we've recently made a change to how we handle some types of mail identified as spam. As a result of this change will be issuing more CON:B1 Refuses to mailers sending this type of spam. It is possible that legitimate senders might be negatively impacted by these changes. If you encounter an issue, please direct your inquiries to the postmaster site (listed below) and open a ticket. Thanks. Lili http://postmaster.aol.com
Yesterday I saw the hammer come down on some allocations, and this morning they are even worse to the point of almost unusable even after letting them cool off for 4/6/12 hours. They've done this before, and after a huge flood of complaints from AOL users, they were forced to open it back up again. I think this was 4th quarter of last year if I recall correctly. All the same, bad news for AOL mailers pushing any major volume.
From AOL Postmaster Blog, nothing new, typical canned ham response. Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1) Posted at 11:10AM on May 7th 2013 by Craig Hanselman
and yet she still says: So how would sending best practices help??? I mean; it can't hurt but here answer blows.
It could hurt legitimate senders because users are stupid and lazy. Stupid and lazy users will click spam instead of unsubscribe. Stupid and lazy users will click Spam instead of delete.
ya ya ya, but my contention is and, until proved wrong; will continue to be: that this is more of a content based thing than user engagement. The wording of this screams "content" to me for some reason....maybe it was the super vague "this type of spam" comment. dunno
Typical AOL... And the best for last... Source: http://postmaster-blog.aol.com/2013/05/06/new-spam-filtering/#comments
It depends on which way the wind blows on any given day is seems as AOL keeps tinkering with the secret sauce. We do 100% AOL exclusive mailing over a solid 5.5 million actives file. I would advise you that if you do not have the AOL IP's to burn, I would not risk the wasting them doing your "testing" to work around filters, volumes, throttles, con blocks, etc.. Some are getting lit up during the low volume warm up process alone. However, if you have the IP's to burn, then it might be worth the efforts assuming AOL is your only game versus mailing ALL of the tlds.
I like how AOL has now conveniently erased all the complaints, err comments about how shitty their service has been lately on their postmaster blog.