Official AOL Postmaster Blog

2:05:58 PM EDT

The AOL Postmaster Team  spends a lot of time helping email senders resolve delivery issues. Our goal  is to educate senders on what practices lead to a good reputation and what  practices generally lead to a poor reputation.  To further this effort, we made a couple of changes to our postmaster website.

First, we added a  new document called “Sender Best Practices.” This document outlines the basic guidelines for  improving your sender reputation.  These are not requirements.  They  are best practices.  Following one or more of these best practices does  not guarantee email delivery or whitelisted status, but the more best  practices you follow, the better your sender reputation should be – and the  better your sender reputation, the better your delivery. 

Second,  we modified our old best practices document and renamed it “Requirements for Sending Email to AOL” which is more appropriate, as these are in fact  requirements.  Failure to meet any of these requirements will result in  delivery issues.

We hope you find these new documents informative.

Christine
Manager, AOL Postmaster Team


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2:56:04 PM EDT
Since the launch of AOL 9.0 in 2004, images and links received from unknown senders have been disabled. In May 2007, our web mail service was enhanced to disable images from unknown senders.  Last week, our newest web mail product, Goa, was released.  This WebSuite release completes the process by disabling links from unknown senders.  Our aim is to provide our members with consistent safety features across all AOL applications.

Annalivia Ford
Senior Technical Account Manager, Postmaster Team



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9:26:08 AM EDT
Invalid recipients are a fact of life for any mailer. You can minimize them with confirmed/double opt-in, but you still have typos and people who change their email addresses. We get that - it's cool.

At the same time, invalid recipients are used industry-wide as a metric of how good a mailing list is, and high invalid recipient numbers are associated with unsolicited mail and namespace mapping. That's not cool.

We've always factored invalid recipients into a sender's reputation, but we want to give you a heads up that we're refining the process a bit.  As such, we would like to remind mailers that high numbers of invalid recipients is a Bad Thing and will result in poor delivery and removal from the whitelist.

Now, I know you, and you are asking, "What's a high number?" That's easy. A high number is a number higher than that which we consider indicative of a good mailer.  If your invalid recipient stats are consistent with mailers similar to you, this shouldn't  matter much to you.  If you generate more invalid recipients than mailers similar to you, you will see a negative impact on your delivery in the near future.

David
Systems Programmer, AOL Postmaster Team





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10:32:18 AM EDT
Welcome to the AOL Postmaster Blog!

Just what the Internet needs, right?  Another blog!  But have no fear, we won’t be writing about the latest American Idol rejects, moaning about our horrible NCAA brackets, or pontificating about the Presidential elections.  Nope, we are here for one reason only — to keep you informed about what’s going on with the AOL Anti-Spam Team and how it might affect you.

If you’d like to be notified each time we create a journal entry, or when someone leaves a comment, click on Alerts or Feeds to subscribe.  Also, feel free to comment on our posts, but please, keep it clean. This is a family establishment.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that this is not the appropriate place to make requests of the AOL Postmaster team.  General postmaster information about our whitelists, feedback loops, block codes, etc. can be found on our website.  If your email to AOL is being blocked, please call 888-212-5537 and be sure to have your error code handy for quick resolution.

Christine
Manager, AOL Postmaster Team



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