The "Spam Button" on AOL
From the AJT Abuse Department
On a daily basis we receive numerous spam complaints against many of our clients. In researching the issue we found that AJT's clients are NOT the ones (purposely) sending the spam. The bad news however is that they are "indirectly" sending the spam. Interested? Read on...
Upon investigating this issue we generally find that the root cause of the problem resides in that, one or more email accounts in AJT's clients mail manager were configured to forward mail to AOL and/other networks email address (es). As normal mail is forwarded to AOL and/or other networks, spam of course, is also being forwarded. These clients then receive the spam from their own account in our network at --let's say -- their AOL account and then they proceed to click the "Report as Spam" button in his/her AOL email client software to thus report the spam. In essence these clients are self-reporting.
As a result of the complaints generated from our client's domain AOL could temporarily block AJT's server IP and/or a particular domain. To stop this blockage from taking place and to thus stop further abuse. What can you do?
Three possibilities.
1. Stop reporting the spam with AOL and thus stop self-reporting - simply delete the email. This is the ideal alternative since its hard to know what comes from your domain and forwarded to AOL and what comes directly to your AOL account - see #3 for another option if you insist on reporting.
2. Find a different alternative to your email forwarding (i.e. gmail, yahoo or hotmail accounts). This is also a really good alternative.
3. If you insist on forwarding mail to your AOL account (not a problem) and you insist on reporting spam (problem) you will want to analyze the full headers of each and every spam email received prior to reporting the spam (highly unlikely that you would want to do this) to make sure that the email is not one that was forwarded from your account with us to your AOL email account. Any references to your domain name or our server name will tell you that it came from your domain.
We would be very appreciative if you would share this information with all email users on your account that might forward email to their personal AOL accounts. You will save yourself (and the AJT abuse team) a lot of hassle.
On a daily basis we receive numerous spam complaints against many of our clients. In researching the issue we found that AJT's clients are NOT the ones (purposely) sending the spam. The bad news however is that they are "indirectly" sending the spam. Interested? Read on...
Upon investigating this issue we generally find that the root cause of the problem resides in that, one or more email accounts in AJT's clients mail manager were configured to forward mail to AOL and/other networks email address (es). As normal mail is forwarded to AOL and/or other networks, spam of course, is also being forwarded. These clients then receive the spam from their own account in our network at --let's say -- their AOL account and then they proceed to click the "Report as Spam" button in his/her AOL email client software to thus report the spam. In essence these clients are self-reporting.
As a result of the complaints generated from our client's domain AOL could temporarily block AJT's server IP and/or a particular domain. To stop this blockage from taking place and to thus stop further abuse. What can you do?
Three possibilities.
1. Stop reporting the spam with AOL and thus stop self-reporting - simply delete the email. This is the ideal alternative since its hard to know what comes from your domain and forwarded to AOL and what comes directly to your AOL account - see #3 for another option if you insist on reporting.
2. Find a different alternative to your email forwarding (i.e. gmail, yahoo or hotmail accounts). This is also a really good alternative.
3. If you insist on forwarding mail to your AOL account (not a problem) and you insist on reporting spam (problem) you will want to analyze the full headers of each and every spam email received prior to reporting the spam (highly unlikely that you would want to do this) to make sure that the email is not one that was forwarded from your account with us to your AOL email account. Any references to your domain name or our server name will tell you that it came from your domain.
We would be very appreciative if you would share this information with all email users on your account that might forward email to their personal AOL accounts. You will save yourself (and the AJT abuse team) a lot of hassle.
posted by The Team @ 9:41 PM
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