Bellsouth, gMail, AOL, Roadrunner & Comcast issues
1. The TLC Brotherhood has pointed out the AOL email delivery problem to the AOL subscribers for several years now. We also know there are currently other ISP experiencing the same trouble. Netscape, Comcast and most Roadrunner Cable systems just to name a few have this same issue. To simplify matters we will refer to AOL only here.
2. AOL is causing the problem, not the TLC Brotherhood, or our Mailman email program.
3. This same problem occurred with our previous email program, MajorDomo. Only difference is you did not see the bounce messages. Our ListMaster did and had to deal with each and every one.
4. Our new mail program is more sophisticated and notifies you about YOUR problem.
5. A bounce is generated when the TLC Mission or Brotherhood Server tries to send a message to YOUR AOL mailbox and AOL refuses to deliver it to your mailbox. AOL then bounces the message back to our server. The reason for this is know only to AOL.
6. After Mailman receives a number of bounced messages that exceeds a limit set in Mailman from all sources, Mailman automatically shuts your TLC Mission or TLC Brotherhood email down.
7. The problem has nothing to do with you sending messages -- only receiving.
8. There is absolutely nothing the TLC Brotherhood can do to prevent AOL from doing this. The only thing we can tell you is how to fix the problem when it occurs.
9. You re-establish your email by following the simple instructions in the disconnect message. You do not have to be a computer expert to solve your problem.
10.
Please do not post questions and request us to fix the problem on either the
11. Beyond this the only solution you have is to learn to live with it or get a different ISP. A number of our members are now using a free mail service to process their TLC Brotherhood mail through.
The following is from the Mailman FAQ regarding the AOL problem:
3.42.
Help!!! All messages from my list are being rejected by AOL (or hotmail, or
Yahoo! or Gmail, etc...) as spam, or being silently thrown away!
AOL has a tendency to declare that sites are sending them spam and to start silently throwing all messages away that come from that site, sometimes on the basis of a single spam complaint from a single user.
Sometimes, that user is a legitimate member of a mailing list from that site, and mistakenly clicked on the wrong message and clicked the "report as spam" button. Sometimes that user doesn't remember subscribing to it, so they report the message as spam. Or, sometimes the user doesn't remember how to unsubscribe, so they report the message as spam.
There's not really anything you can do about this. You are subject to the whims of the clueless AOL users and the occasional fat-finger mistake.
Sometimes you send too much e-mail in a given period of time (or too many envelope recipients per message), so you end up tripping various other "bulk e-mail" alarms, even though there's nothing else "wrong" with your list. Sometimes this even happens if you have signed up with AOL to be a known "large e-mail provider", so that you theoretically are allowed to by-pass the standard "bulk e-mail" thresholds.
There's not really anything you can do about this, either.
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Note that this problem is not unique to AOL, they are simply one of the largest and most visible providers. Most everything said above can also be applied to other large sites, such as Yahoo!, hotmail, GMail, etc....
Basically, if your mailing list is large enough or gets enough traffic, you may have problems with various sites that you simply cannot solve. You have to decide whether you're going to live with these problems, or if you're going to drive yourself to an early grave by worrying about things you cannot change.