Newsletters... AOL... and the Spam Button

I wrote a while back about what a great tool a newsletter can be to help retain visitors to your site. Well I'm here to complain about newsletters now.

I stopped sending my newsletter out a few months back. Why? Well apparently folks at AOL have a button (like many email/ISP service providers) that lets them mark emails as SPAM very easily. I'm finding that most folks, probably for convenience, mark my newsletter as spam when they want to unsubscribe.

The thing is, I'm not upset about it. I've done the exact same thing before with mail I didn't recognize, or didn't want to receive any more. But now that I'm a newsletter publisher, I totally realize the problem with this. The more my messages get marked as spam, the more likely I am to marked/blacklisted as a spammer! Even sending out a legitimate newsletter can get you in trouble. So I gave it up for a few months. I already have enough trouble getting my user registration emails to get to AOL folks. So much trouble that I have actually hard-coded an exception for AOL users! They don't have to validate their accounts with a link from an email message. I just let them in!

But now I thought I would give it another try. I went ahead and sent out a newsletter yesterday. Now mind you we have 20,000+ folks on our list. After day one, I'm back in the same boat! I get all these AOL users marking my newsletter as spam! Out of 20,000 emails sent, I got close to 40 (all AOL) users click the spam button.

I'm planning on making a call to AOL today to inquire about it. I had previously signed up for the email "whitelist" a few weeks back but never heard back from them. Then finally I got a "request denied" email saying I never followed up with their email instructions on next steps. Huh? I never received a second email? I guess they have just as much trouble sending email as they do receiving it.