TagAOL

Where's AOL?

I hear almost nothing about AOL from clients and potential clients these days. I hear a lot from AOL users who are confused and don’t understand that I am not AOL support (I’m not. Really. I can’t help you.). But I hear almost nothing from clients. There are three possibilities I can think of for this. AOL just isn’t a major player in the mail space any more. People...

Mythbusting deliverability and engagement

Yesterday I published an article talking about an engagement webinar hosted by the EEC and DMA. I made a couple predictions about what would be said. ISPs do monitor engagement, even if they do it differently than senders thought. Engagement is important for inbox delivery at some ISPs. Different ISPs have different ways of making inbox decisions. Engagement will matter more in the future. And...

Email predictions for 2015

Welcome to a whole new year. It seems the changing of the year brings out people predicting what they think will happen in the coming year. It’s something I’ve indulged in a couple times over my years of blogging, but email is a generally stable technology and it’s kind of boring to predict a new interface or a minor tweak to filters. Of course, many bloggers will go way out on...

A new way of reading email

Fastcompany reports that AOL has a new webmail client “Alto” that changes how email is read and received. Alto is divided into two main windows: a streamlined column of mail that matters, and a grid of tiles for navigating leftover inbox clutter. In Alto, many messages and files are automatically and neatly aggregated into tiles of common categories: for photos, attachments, social...

How useful are feedback loops

Things are extremely busy here and blogging is going to be light for a few weeks. I’ll be reposting some older blog posts that are still relevant for today’s email senders. Today’s post is a repost from November 2008. I look at the whys and hows of FBLs, address some of the objections people had to them and discuss how senders should deal with FBL mail. There has been a very long, ongoing...

The more things change

I was doing some research about the evolution of the this-is-spam button for a blog article. In the middle of it, I found an old NY Times report about spam from 2003. At the same time, the argument is intensifying over what represents legitimate e-mail, particularly when it ends up being blocked by an antispam filter. Last November, AOL threatened to block e-mail from Gap. Even though Gap said it...

DMARC and organizations

Comcast recently published a statement on DMARC over on their postmaster page. The short version is that Comcast is publishing a DMARC record, but has no current intentions to publish a p=reject policy for Comcast user email. Comcast will be publishing a p=reject for some of their domains that they use exclusively to communicate with customers, like billing notices and security notices. Comcast...

AOL admits to security breach

According to Reuters AOL has admitted there was a breach of their network security that compromised 2% of their accounts. Users are being told to reset their passwords, and security questions. AOL started investigating the attack after users started reporting an uptick in spam from aol.com addresses. This spam was using @aol.com addresses to send mail to addresses in that user’s address...

AOL publishes a p=reject DMARC record

Yesterday I mentioned that there were reports of a compromise at AOL. While the details are hazy, what has been reported is that people’s address books were stolen. The reports suggest lots of people are getting mail from AOL addresses that they have received mail from in the past, but that mail is coming from non AOL servers. In an apparent effort to address this, AOL announced today they...

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