BREAKTHROUGH FOR AOL E-SYLUM READERS?

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V14 2011 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 14, Number 6, February 6, 2011, Article 2

As noted in several earlier E-Sylum articles, many of our AOL subscribers have been having difficulty accessing their weekly E-Sylum email. AOL is notorious for being difficult to work with, and several weeks ago they made a change that started causing these problems.

It's taken a while, but we may finally have a breakthrough. Engineers at our mailing list hosting company Binhost have been looking into it, and this week we ran some tests of a possible fix. Binhost tech Shuli was the latest to look into it, and she discovered that AOL had gotten more strict on the details of email header information. At my request she set up a test mailing list, and I recruited some volunteers from among the folks who had reported trouble. She tweaked our header information and we ran the test. Here's what folks had to say.

Whatever she did seems to be working (at least for now).

Yes! I was able to open and read The E-Sylum for the first time in months.

Thanks also to Alan V. Weinberg, Steve Tompkins, and Joe Boling, who also reported positive results. Following this test we feel confident enough to try it with the entire mailing list - today's issue is being sent out with the revised version of the header. Most readers should see no difference, but AOL readers who've previously had problems may be able to open and read their email again. Thanks for bearing with us while we researched the problem (with zero cooperation from AOL).

If an AOL readers are having the separate problem of The E-Sylum landing in their spam folder, an E-Sylum reader offers this advice:

For the spam folder issue... there have been a lot of changes around mail and mail settings. If they go to Keyword: Spam, or http://daol.aol.com/security/spam , there's a button there to go to the Spam Controls. Once there, make sure the email address and domain that the Esylum comes from is not listed in the "Block mail from these users" area.

If the mail has ever landed in Spam, it's probably listed in there so it will be delivered to the Spam folder every time until it's removed from the Block list. After taking it out of the Block list (or just making sure it's not there), lightening up on the Spam threshold in the same page (going from Medium to Low, for instance) should also help alleviate some of the problems.

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see: THE AOL SAGA CONTINUES (www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v14n05a02.html)

Wayne Homren, Editor