AOL recently began a new anti spam campaign that could have a major impact on your email. If you send email to an AOL customer and that customer decides that the message you sent is spam and flags it as such AOL will keep track of that and notifies us that someone in our network is sending spam. After an unknown number of spam reports are generated AOL will block the entire CConnect.net network.

You may think that this does not affect you because you do not send spam. You are wrong. I have reviewed the messages that AOL has sent to us regarding spam for the last 10 days and they contain messages that any of our customers may send out. For example; one message that was flagged as spam by an AOL customer was a message about illegal immigration that one of our customers had forwarded to about 5 friends, 2 which had AOL accounts. At least one of those people did not like what they saw and flagged it as spam. In another instance a customer of Cconnect.net sent a joke to about 30 people and some on that list were AOL customers. One of the AOL customers flagged it as spam. Another was a chain email about a friendship bracelet.

As I reviewed each email I saw that they were usually harmless emails that someone just did not want to receive. Spam is Unsolicited Email. If you are sending out email please make sure that it is something that the recipient might want to see. Please avoid forwarding all sorts of chain emails as they are most likely to be flagged as spam.

In my conversations with representatives of AOL they made it clear that if they get enough spam flags from the same domain or network over a certain time period they will block that domain for a time period. They would not disclose what the limits are or the time that a network or domain would be blocked.

When you send out a joke or political statement or funny picture please consider whether everyone on your list with an AOL address will consider this a valid email. If AOL gets several blocks in one period they will stop all mail from cconnect.net from getting to their customers regardless of its content. Please understand that Carolina Connection has no power to correct this situation when and if it occurs. The first time that we were blocked was a couple of weeks ago and I spent several hours talking with AOL and we were blocked for approximately 3 days. This spam system affects any organization sending mail to AOL not just us.

The bottom line is that you will now need to be more careful af any mail that is sent to an AOL address.

Thank you,

Uncle Joe

Joe Scharbrough