From: Steve Marak <samarak at gizmoworks.com> on 2006.12.25 at 18:44:47(15020)
... everyone else can delete (unless you want to know more about the bounce and
auto-unsubscribe policies of Aroid-L), and sorry for cluttering your inboxes
with this on Christmas day.
We've had another occurence of most of the AOL subscribers of Aroid-L having
their subscriptions disabled for excessive bounced messages. I was unaware of
the problem until one of you sent me a note asking about his subscription, but
I've since gone through and re-enabled every affected AOL subscriber again.
(Not every AOL subscriber was affected - maybe 2 or 3 out of 30-odd were not. I
don't have any idea why most are affected and a few aren't.)
The Aroid-L bounce policy is one of the most liberal of which I'm aware. On any
day in which one or more messages to you bounced, a +1 is added to your "bounce
score". (No matter how many messages bounce in one day, it's just a +1 for the
day.) Any time 3 days go by without any messages to you bouncing, your score is
reset to zero. If your score reaches 10, your subscription is disabled.
If your account is disabled, the list will try to send you a warning each week
for 5 weeks before finally unsubscribing you. So it's not easy to be
unsubscribed from Aroid-L for bouncing messages. It takes at minimum 6.5 weeks,
but you can miss a lot of messages during that time.
The down side of such a liberal policy is that I get messages for every user in
every instance in every abnormal situation. I'm bombarded with scores of
messages for this every day, most of which work themselves out without any
intervention from me, so the odds of me noticing this AOL situation early on
are small. If you are an AOL subscriber and haven't been receiving Aroid-L
messages for a week or so, I encourage you to check your subscription or send
me a note and ask me to check it.
The number of cases where anyone except an AOL subscriber is disabled or
removed for excessive bounces is very very small, and is almost always because
that e-mail address has gone away (i.e., it's legitimate). With AOL, on the
other hand, we see this situation where most of you are disabled at least 2 or
3 times every year, and it's never legitimate (and it's a pain to fix). There's
nothing I can do about it, so if you're affected, I'd encourage you to
complain to AOL.
We now return you to your regular Christmas Aroid-L activity.
Steve
|