Attention AOL Users

Users of AOL cannot take advantage of this board's email notification feature. AOL rejects the notification email as spam. This causes the board's email queues to fill up with rejected email notifications.Therefore email notification for AOL users will be turned off in individual member profiles.

I am hopeful that email notification will now work for AOL users. If you're an AOL user who wants email notification when someone replies to one of your posts, please go to your profile and select "Yes" for Email Notification, then click "Submit Modifications". No need to let me know whether it works or not, I'll be able to tell.

---

--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

A friend of mine works at AOL and apparently the only reason certain emails get treated as spam is when a user reports it as spam. That means we have some users who are active who use AOL who are CHOOSING to get notifications who are then telling AOL they are spam.You may be able to fix things Percy by following a link on one of the returns which puts evc on a white list but I think that repeated reporting of EvC mail as spam can still pull you off the white list.I think it is kinda stupid too that AOL relies on users rather than any one of the other spam detection methods out there but hey, its AOL and we all know that AOL pretty much sucks.

---

No smoking signs by gas stations. No religion in the public square. The government should keep us from being engulfed in flames on earth, and that is pretty much it. -- Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

As far as I know, AOL is doing something more than you describe.It is my understanding that they are blocking some email completely. They are blocking dynamic IPs, which would probably include end users on many cable, dsl and dialup networks. They are blocking IPs with no reverse DNS (most likely was the problem for evcforum). I'm not sure what else they block. I think they do block sites with a record of high spam rates.You are right, however, that they have a system where aol users can flag a message as spam. As far as I know, if the proportion of spam to non-spam is too high, AOL will block mail from that site.At my campus, we have requested that AOL send us copies of all mail recieved from campus IP addresses and reported as spam by AOL users. We mainly use this to spot spammers quickly and shut them down. Over the last year we have probably blocked around 5 or so spammers (virus-infected user machines remotely controlled by spammers).Currently, I get to see these AOL reports. Yes, aol users are careless on what they report. A lot of legitimate mail is reported as spam. However, most of what I see is a student has forwarded his campus mailbox to aol, because he prefers to read mail on aol. Spam is received for his campus mailbox, forwarded to aol, then the user flags it as spam.