News: AOL Blocks 780 Million "Junk Emails" a Day
America Online reported on Feb. 23, 2003, that it is blocking up to 780 million spam emails a day -- an estimated 22 email messages per day per user. AOL uses a proprietary spam filtering system driven by a spam-reporting system that allows a user to register a spam complaint by clicking a "Report Spam" button. According to AOL, members are using the button up to 4.1 million times daily.
Views: Less spam on AOL, more problems for publishers
Experience shows that spam filtering systems block out a goodly percentage of email newsletters and commercial messages that are in fact distributed through opt-in lists. I think it's a good guess that many AOL users clicking the "Report Spam" button are flagging email messages that they actually requested. The sympathetic view is that they just forgot -- the cynical view is that they are too lazy to unsubscribe in the normal way and are using the "Report Spam" feature as an easy way to "get off" a list.
In any case, the increasing use of spam filtering systems is requiring email publishers and marketers to bend back farther and farther to make it under the limbo stick. Many publishers now test the content of every message to make sure it doesn't contain too many trigger words. Many who once had a casual attitude about their subscription procedures are going over to a double-opt-in process to make sure their subscribers really want to be on the list.
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Al Bredenberg
Publisher
EmailResults.com
