[Tfug] Technical harassment, or "Computer knowledge is more important than anything else intheworld."

[George Cohn]

Jon wrote:
>
> 
> Are you referring to the possibility of the list being blacklisted or
> blocked by some other host?
> 

I've seen it happen more than once, especially with AOL.  A user doesn't 
want to bother to unsubscribe from a list so they mark the messages as 
spam and they get returned to AOL.

Once they get a few dozen, they place that host on their "black hole" 
list and block any messages from them to any user at AOL.

It's happened to us more than a few times on the jag-lovers lists that I 
admin.  We have to call them and explain that we run an opt-in list with 
many links to allow the user to unsubscribe yet their users are too 
dense to understand that all it takes is clicking on a link.

Happened with a few other ISP's as well but I don't think we've had 
nearly as many problems with all of them put together as with AOL users.

We also require plain text and no attachments and we had a devil of a 
time with one release of the AOL software as there just wasn't any easy 
way to set it to send plain text.  Not my idea of a progressive ISP, 
just a good marketing campaign.

We finally developed our own software that allows us to run mailing 
lists and web based forums in sync.  Anything that gets posted to one 
gets copied to the other as well so users have the best of both worlds, 
e-mail based or web based.

George Cohn
www.jag-lovers.org