Re: [ATM] Time to change the list format?

[Mark Holm <mdholm@telerama.com>]

> Well, you want to call AOL and talk to them about this?  I did when Bob 
> Mays sig was causing bounces.  They are the 1000 pound gorilla and they 
> know it.  

I thought I read recently that AOL has steadily been losing customers
for years and the trend continues.

I am not convinced AOL really intends at this point in time to try to
extract money out of little operators like mailing lists.  Of course, if
they can get money out of bigger operators, and I am not even a little
convinced they will succeed in that, they may get greedy about the
little guys too.

AOL does do very vigorous email filtering, trying to keep spam, viruses
etc, from their retail customers.  Most trouble getting email into AOL
results from this.  They look at the technical attributes of email
messages much more closely than many isp's and look askance at ones that
do not have all their technical ducks in a row.  The reason is that
spammers, viruses, etc. often do not and can not have the technical
points of their email setups correct, so technical correctness is a
(partial) way to distinguish good guys from bad.  The thing is, the
email "system" has been very lax about enforcing it's own technical
standards so a lot of "good" email senders, quite possibly including
atmlist, are not actually doing things per the specs.  People get upset,
confused, etc. when AOL and others filter based in part on compliance
with the specs, but AOL is really only enforcing standards that email
senders are supposed to follow anyhow.  Most of these technical issues
are way under the radar for average email users.  Only people who set up
email servers, mailing list servers and their DNS entries are involved.
 Even those people are often ignorant of the finer points, because, as I
already said, the internet has been really lax about enforcing
standards.  People get by with setups that are just minimally correct,
but actually have significant deviations from the specs.  When somebody
gets pointed about following the rules of the game to the letter, all
those that have been getting by with sloppy setups suddenly get shocked.

-- 
Mark Holm
mdholm@telerama.com

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