Whitelisting? No - Blacklisting

From the SD front page:

I think you mean “blacklisting”.

White List - Wikipedia

No, they mean “whitelisting”.

My company’s website developed a problem earlier this year with our email addressed to AOL users getting bounced. It seems AOL had recently changed its rules of how it dealt with incoming mail, and if a site doesn’t have all its internet cross-reference ducks in a row, they were rejecting mail from that site.

For the types of things you need cross-referenced, take a look here: http://www.dnsstuff.com/. If everything doesn’t agree, they’ll decide you are spam. Apparently, you can work around that by getting “whitelisted”, but from what I read it’s very difficult. It’s a lot easier to just file all the DNS entries properly, which is what our company did, and now we aren’t having our email bounced.

However, I suspect SDMB’s problems are different. Because the mail from SDMB is automated (i.e., “subscribe to thread” emails), AOL is spotting this and deciding everything from this site is spam, and the only way around it for the SDMB is to qualify for that “white list”.

However, I would think an individual AOL user white list an address themselves for just their account, but I could be wrong.

However, I just now re-read the front page and I see they’ve changed their wording:

Sorry, citybadger, you’re quite right. Whoever wrote that either meant “blacklisting our mailing list provider” or “failing to whitelist our mailing provider”.

Our weekly Straight Dope mailing is handled by Ray Owens at Joke-A-Day as a favor to us; he’s a fan of Cecil’s work.

We are but a drop in the Joke-A-Day mailing ocean, I’m sure they send out vast numbers of email all the time.

AOL is determined to fight spammers and they have an elaborate system of filters in place. The threshold for spammers is set very low; as an AOL member myself, I have of late been frequently denied access to email, as my group emails to SD staff is enough to be considered a spammer by AOL’s standards.

(Yes, it’s stupid.)

We’ve asked Ray numerous times to work things out with AOL (apparently mass mailers have to go through a most tedious process to get AOL to accept their emails), but nothing’s changed.

I tried contacting AOL myself to get this worked out on our behalf. They told me there was nothing we could do, it’s on Ray.

So all we can do is advise our mailing list members with AOL accounts to use a non-AOL address if they wish to see the weekly mailing. Sorry about that.

TubaDiva

Right, but the wording is still incorrect. Were the Straightdope to be whitelisted, there would be no problem.

citybadger and Ponder Stibbons (in his 2nd post) are right. The announcement should either read ‘blacklisted’, or ‘failure to whitelist’. The current one is wrong.

Yeah, it should read, "Sign up for the Straight Dope mailing list! Unless you’re an AOL customer, they don’t think you should see it. "

Point taken. I’ll change the front page.

TubaDiva