[Mailman-Users] Mailman postings deferred by Yahoo

[Brad Knowles]

On 2/21/08, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

>  > It's just yahoo that behaves like a black sheep in this game.
>
>  But that's simply not true.  AOL has a deservedly bad reputation, as
>  does Hotmail.  I've had problems with a number of universities, as
>  well (deserved, in a sense, but it was damn hard to get off the ban
>  list once we got on).

Actually, fighting spam is one area where AOL has historically done 
pretty well.  I know that it was the biggest part of my job when I 
was the Sr. Internet Mail System Administrator there, and I took my 
job very seriously.  We did a lot of things to prevent our customers 
from spamming, and we did a lot of things to try to protect them from 
getting spam.  We also set up the feedback loop mechanism (and I 
think AOL was the first site to create such a thing), so that admins 
at other sites around the world could get reports about what was 
happening through their mail servers.

Where AOL has fallen down is by making the "Report as Spam" button 
far too easy to hit, and doesn't require any kind of confirmation or 
anything.

And they don't give any negative feedback to their users when they 
just hit the "Report as Spam" button when they are actually getting 
mail that they really did ask for, but they're just being stupid.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>