Interesting People mailing list archives
IP: RE: Let you decide where the truth is -- AOL and Harvard
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Mon, 07 Jan 2002 14:44:19 -0500
From: To: "David Farber" <dave () farber net> FOR publication, not FOR attribution. Thanks. Dave, I work for a company that delivers large amounts of e-mail for Fortune-1000 companies. We had a very similar problem with AOL: we started to see many of our messages fail to arrive in AOL mailboxes even though AOL reported they were successfully accepted for delivery. Sending one or two messages at a time would work flawlessly, but when sending anything larger, some might arrive while many would not. After a lot of testing, we discovered AOL has some very interesting policies regarding email delivery. In a nutshell, if you deliver more than some number messages to AOL within an a certain timeframe, AOL will accept them for delivery but in actuality, delete them without notice. The metrics AOL uses to decide what should or should not be delivered are not published. We solved this when, after several months of spotty delivery, we finally got to the right person within AOL who informed us they maintain a "white list" of companies like ours that are allowed to deliver messages "in bulk" to AOL recipients. Once we found out about its existence, a few emails and a faxed affidavit later, we saw all our messages delivered without incident. I would imagine Harvard fell afoul of these policies.
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- IP: RE: Let you decide where the truth is -- AOL and Harvard David Farber (Jan 07)
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- IP: RE: Let you decide where the truth is -- AOL and Harvard David Farber (Jan 07)