[epub] AOL Deliverability Success

[Lewis <lewis@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Folks,

I just wanted to write about my experience dealing with AOL.  Many of 
you may have been through this already or given up on AOL but we have 
nearly 1/4 of our users on AOL so it's vital that their users receive 
our email.  About a month ago we started receiving a lot of complaints 
from people on AOL that they were sporadically receiving our newsletter 
and then stopped receiving it all together.

While AOL is a pain to deal with on many levels, they actually have a 
phone number where you can contact people about deliverability 
problems.  I spent a morning on the phone with various people at AOL 
and the first thing we determined is that our IP, sending email, etc, 
had not been banned or blocked.  We were in good standing overall with 
AOL.  At some point we were handed off to some more technically 
knowledgeable support people and they had us subscribe a test AOL 
address to one of our newsletters and send them a test message.

The response to that test address gave us the first meaningful 
information we needed to fix the problem.  Basically it informed us 
that email was not getting through because of domains contained within 
our newsletter (other than our domain).  We removed every domain from 
our newsletter other than our own and magically, every newsletter went 
through and we got a message from about 100 happy AOL subscribers 
within a few hours. Basically, our minimally effective affiliate ads 
were preventing us from sending to a huge block of our subscribers.  An 
easy fix would be (I am sure this isn't news to many of you) to create 
redirects from your url for every url in your newsletter.

Long story short, AOL pays close attention to domains in your 
newsletter.  I hope this helps someone.

Here's the post master address for AOL:
http://postmaster.aol.com/

Lewis

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