About half of you got your weekly e-newsletter late (or will get it in the next couple hours). We're sorry about the delay, but it was beyond our control.

Technogeeks and AOL users read below or click to the jump: The upshot is that I'd never use or recommend SMTP.com again and we're likely to stop accepting AOL addresses for email registration.

We send our emails out through a third-party service, as AT&T doesn't really care for people popping out tens of thousands of emails through their pipes. Eventually, we'll get our own mailserver, but our our volume isn't big enough yet for it to be a priority.

We were using AuthSMTP, but they were a bit pricey. So a couple months ago we switched to SMTP.com. Better deal, although one thing they didn't provide that AuthSMTP did was detailed spam complaint reporting.

We've never worried much about that, because our lists are opt-in, containing only our registered users who agreed to receive email. And although we do very rarely make mistakes and miss an opt-out, we're religious about respecting opt-out requests. Even so, the detailed spam reporting would generally show a number of complaints each week, almost all from AOL.

It turns out that AOL was so besieged by spam that they threw the baby out with the bathwater in creating their feedback loop. Most providers take spam complaints by having you email to an address like "abuse@domainname.com." AOL files a spam complaint any time a user hits the "junk" button on their email. That's the digital equivalent of sending a SWAT team over to your neighbors house every time you comment on the state of his lawn.

Most users don't realize that they are filing a complaint when they do this. In fact, we used to remove these AOL users when we got the report, but it got tiresome manually re-adding them to our lists when they contacted us to complain that they no longer received our emails.

So, last night, middle of the night, our email blast stopped cold. I went into our SMTP.com account this morning and it appeared that we were over our monthly subscription limit. So I tried to buy additional relays with no luck. So I contacted SMTP.com support and received a response that we'd been blocked as a spammer because of AOL complaints. They said they had sent an email to our billing contact overnight. (She's out of town right now, in transit from a confab at Google HQ, so I don't know if she got it or not.)

All of this I could have accepted. A good white knight email service has to be careful. And mistakes can be made, albeit with better customer contact and warning than this. Especially when it also shut down our site emails (like event reminders and challenge-response for site -- and newsletter -- subscription.

But the kicker was this line in SMTP.com's email:

"When the above steps are taken, please let us know and we would be more than

happy to restore your account. Please note, for REACTIVATION of ACCOUNTS

closed due to spam complaints we charge an extra one month's fee."

The "above steps" were CAN-Spam compliance measures that we already follow.

I informed them of this and told them I would not pay any extra monthly fee because they inaccurately booted our account, creating problems for our users and advertisers. And they basically told me to bugger off. When I challenged the AOL practice, they claimed that they had a Spam Assassin report showing our email as a high likelihood for being flagged spam.

Our software uses an implementation of the Spam Assassin program as well. Here's its report:

SMTP.com refused to provide us their report.

Look, I understand the need for an email service provider to be careful to avoid spam. But this smacks to me of a shakedown -- We know you're going to get AOL complaints, and we'll look the other way if you pay us extra. That's my problem with SMTP.com. (That and that I can't even get a receipt out of their system to true up our accounting.)

Meantime, AuthSMTP got us back online and in working order in less than a half hour. That's customer service worth paying for. Or perhaps SMTP.com could provide a useful report complete with a customer service action plan like this provider.

But, the fact is that any provider, even one with good customer service, may have issues with these AOL complaints. We'll research further this week, but we may well have to instill a policy of not sending emails to anyone on the AOL domain. That's roughly 5% of our registered user-base.

Sigh. I need another dose of silly dancing...

Comments

Mike Orren Staff

Sorry about that, linster. The story above was already over-complicated, so I failed to mention that an equipment failure caused the final re-send to break down with about 1,500 addresses to go, and without data as to which addys those were. At that point, we decided not to push our luck by re-emailing more than 10k to reach those last 1,500. We'll be back in order this week...

5 months ago ( Link to this comment | Suggest removal )

Mike Orren Staff

A reader sends this note:

Mike, thank you for your post on http://SMTP.com. We are currently utilizing them also and are running into the EXACT same problems in regards to their abrupt decisions to cancel accounts and the inability to reactivate them immediately.

They deactivated us due to the AOL complaints which we told them were unjustified cause of AOL policies. We are close to leaving http://SMTP.com.

My questions is did you guys switch service and if so, who would you recommend switching to?

We went back to http://AuthSMTP.com, which is pricier but gets the job done.

4 months, 1 week ago ( Link to this comment | Suggest removal )