[Mailman-Users] mailman & AOL's "Client TOS notification"

[Chuq Von Rospach]

anyone on any of my lists who files a spam complaint against my mail 
list gets unsubscribed. when they resubscribe and complain about being 
dropped, they get The Lecture and The Warning. If they send a second 
round of spam complaints, they get unsubscribed and banned.

Funny, AOL users learn quickly once it's in their best interest to use 
the software right. Well, except for one or two. Now, I'm not happy I 
have to spend my time teaching AOL users how to use their software 
properly because it's badly designed and AOL doesn't teach then, 
but....

I had an extreme case of this last week. A user filed about five spam 
complaints with AOL against one of my lists. I unsubscribed her. She 
resubscribed immediately without sending any email at all. So I sent 
her the Lecture and the Warning via email. that bounced because of her 
address book sendings. So she got unsubscribed again to get her notice, 
and I SMTP blocked her with a 500 message telling her to contact me via 
another address.

Her response: attempt to subscribe again. The confirmation, of course, 
was rejected by my server, and that rejection, of course, bounced 
because of her spam blocking settings. And so we sit. One might think, 
if stuff like this were happening, to actually e-mail the ADMIN asking 
what the hell's going on -- but no?

And frankly, that's not MY problem. Not any more. Not after all these 
AOL users doing stupid things because AOL writes software to encourage 
it...

chuq (but I'm not bitter!)


On Nov 4, 2003, at 7:54 AM, Ricardo Kustner wrote:

> Are there any other mailmain admins here who also get alot of 
> complaints through AOL? Any tips on what I can do about it before my 
> server and possibly ISP gets blacklisted?