AOL whitelisting - a heads-up and a request for assistance

Mailman List Mirror (Read Only)
1

Hi Folks,

This is both a request for assistance and a warning which I hope
will benefit others. We've been on AOL's whitelist for more than
5 years. We've been reorganizing our delivery servers in the past
month or so with no problems. A recent spike in complaints from
one of our clients' lists (which we've isolated) has alerted us to
the fact that our historically whitelisted IP addresses are no
longer whitelisted. A call to AOL's postmaster line confirms that
no IPs are listed for our company, either whitelisted or blacklisted.
That is, our IPs have been dropped from the whitelist database or
lost.

In re-applying for whitelisting, I do see that AOL requires a
minimum of 100 emails/month to maintain a whitelist entry. This
is new to me, and would be worth nothing for others who may be
adding or removing servers.

The postmaster line informed me that it would be 3-5 business days
for the whitelisting to be updated. AOL deliveries are critical
to our business, so even a day of disruption is too long. I would
be very greatful if someone could help expedite our request. Please
contact me off-list.

Omar Thameen
omar@biglist.com
212-686-2140

2

In re-applying for whitelisting, I do see that AOL requires a
minimum of 100 emails/month to maintain a whitelist entry. This
is new to me, and would be worth nothing for others who may be
adding or removing servers.

Sounds like an obvious motivation for any big mailing list vendor to get an
AOL consumer account and subscribe it to a dummy list with 4-5 messages/day,
or perhaps more often if you want to do more dynamic monitoring...

3

This was not obvious for me before, but I am wondering what happens to the
list servers that are not in AOL's white list? I wonder if it is 100
emails for each list, or 100 emails to AOL from all lists on the server.

More reason to tell AOL users to go to Netscape, I guess.

-Sean

4

You want to read http://postmaster.info.aol.com - and maybe call the
1-888 number they have for their postmaster team on that site.

What aol does is pretty clear and well documented

-srs