AOL:
With over 22 million active subscribers, AOL is the largest ISP in the world. AOL offers customers access to their proprietary content and the Internet through both dialup and broadband access. Almost all AOL customers access their email via the proprietary AOL software, the latest of which is 9.0.
If your lists are consumer-oriented, chances are good that they will contain a large percentage of AOL addresses. AOL receives billions of pieces of mail each day - a large portion of them (nearly 1.2 billion messages)
in the form of unsolicited commercial email (UCE), commonly referred to as SPAM. To curb this problem, AOL has taken a unique approach by allowing their users to simply click a button to report a message as SPAM. These reports are tabulated in real time and are analyzed by AOL to determine if action is warranted. Measures may include declining to accept email transmissions
from a particular sender.
SPAM reports from AOL's members fell from a daily average of almost 11 million in November 2003 to a daily average of about 2.2 million in November 2004 and their email filters handled 50% less email traffic over that same time period. The company credits their anti-SPAM measures for the reduction in SPAM. What this means is that there is still a big window of opportunity for marketers to reach their AOL members with permission-based email campaigns, but success will ride on the mailer's ability to maintain good-standing with AOL.
General guidelines for sending email to America Online can be found at their Postmaster's web site: http://postmaster.aol.com.
One additional issue is that some messages get through to the AOL member but end up in their SPAM folder. Since each member's SPAM folder is controlled by their individual mail preferences, the postmaster team can neither view nor change the settings that control what mail is going to the folder. You will want to have your recipient check to make sure that isn't happening. If it is, the recipient will need to add the sending address of the email to their address book.
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