[Mailman-Users] more questions about Yahoo feedback loop and abuse complaints

[Larry Stone]

On Jun 16, 2012, at 11:02 AM, Richard Damon wrote:

> On 6/15/12 8:51 PM, David wrote:
>> On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 1:04 AM, Ralf Hildebrandt <
>> Ralf.Hildebrandt at charite.de> wrote:
>> 
>>> * Thomas Hochstein <mailman-users at ml.th-h.de>:
>>>> Ralf Hildebrandt schrieb:
>>>> 
>>>>> Yahoo! users are truly special.
>>>> AOL users are, too. (They also have a feedback loop.)
>>> Yeah, and it's even worse, since it tries to weed out all info one
>>> needs to identify the user :(
>>> 
>> Is there any method to identify the user from the AOL feedback loop? If
>> not, how does AOL expect us to unsubscribe the user who complained?
>> 
> They DON'T expect you to unsubscribe the user who marked you as spam,
> but to stop the "spammer" who is sending out the email marked as spam.
> The whole system is based on the premise that the recipient (their
> customer) is totally innocent, and the send (your list) is the guilty
> party. They are telling you, as an ISP, to stop your customer (your
> list) from sending "SPAM". They are totally missing that their customer
> at a previous point ASKED for the email (at least I am presuming you
> haven't bypassed the safeguards built into Mailman to avoid abuse) and
> now has used the "Mark as spam" button as a attempt to unsubscribe
> because they can't (or won't) figure out the proper way to do it.


Sad to say, that does appear to be how AOL thinks. Their customers never make mistakes, etc. If a customer clicked "Mark as spam", then it's spam and that point is not open to discussion.

It's been a long while since I've received an AOL spam report but despite their redacting, I can usually figure out who did it my some sleuthing through the mail server logs. My policy for AOL users is straightforward and ruthless: do it once and you get banned from my lists and my server. I banned my cousin once (and in typical AOLuser fashion, denied clicking the button - and he used to work for AOL!).

-- 
Larry Stone
lstone19 at stonejongleux.com
http://www.stonejongleux.com/