How to improve AOL delivery

DMNews interviewed Charles before he left AOL about the state of spam and the challenges for ISPs and how that affects senders. The article was published this week. In it he talks about

  • The botnet problem and what AOL is doing to combat it
  • How AOL monitors its users
  • What kinds of things AOL measures for mail, including email sources and volume
  • How AOL leaves some filtering to users through the ‘this is spam’ button
  • Authentication

All in all a good article and worth a read for someone interested in what goes on behind the scenes at AOL.

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Busy Busy.

Getting ready to head to MAAWG next week. We leave for the plane in a couple hours. I expect there will be some interesting information coming out of the talks and sessions and will be sharing some of the more interesting bits throughout the week.
Also, Steve has written a new tool to visualize blacklists. He’s put up a beta version. It still has a few bugs and missing features, but there are already some interesting patterns in XBL data with it.
The demo installation only displays XBL data (rather than letting you overlay multiple datasets) and is missing search and bookmarking, amongst other things. Enough disclaimers yet?

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New VP at Goodmail

Charles Stiles, who managed the postmaster team at AOL and was laid off 2 weeks ago, is the new VP of Worldwide Business Development at Goodmail.
Ken Magill mentioned the possibility of Charles moving to Goodmail yesterday.

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Changes at AOL Postmaster desk

The recent layoffs at AOL did affect the AOL Postmaster desk, and information I have received is that there was significant loss. As a result of the staff decrease, some changes have been made to the whitelisting and FBL processes. In order for a FBL to be approved it must meet the new FBL guidelines. In a nutshell, anyone wanting to get a FBL from AOL must meet ONE of the following criteria.

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