If I were a large corporation that depended on mass email to communicate with my customers and others with whom I had a commercial relationship (which is not considered spam by any of the legislation about spam), I would absolutely refuse to accept any client email address that ended with @AOL.COM.
AOL has got the absolute worst anti-spam system in the universe. When you click that little "This is Spam" (or whatever it says) button in your AOL mail client, you don't know the problems you are causing for businesses that use email.
Unless you have what AOL calls a "spam feedback loop" set up to intercept the spam reports from AOL and deal with them in a timely manner, AOL will block your ass when enough people have pushed the spam button on you. But here's the catch: They redact any information from the email that would make it possible for you to identify the user who pushed the spam button.
Yes. They want you to stop sending this person mail but they won't tell you who the person is. You have to find a way to figure it out on your own. Luckily my employer is a Smart Guy(tm) and he did. Of course, when AOL has a meltdown like they appear to have had in the last week or so and they start banning IPs for spam even if they use the feedback loop system, that doesn't help much. Let me tell you something, AOL: Accusing a legitimate entity of sending 419 spam without even checking into where the mail originated is not a good way to make friends and influence people.
There are other ways to deal with this problem but since AOL doesn't want to upset its customers by telling them that they need to stop reflexively hitting the SPAM button instead of just trashing that piece of mail from their student loan office offering to refinance their loans, AOL is never going to solve the problem.
And if businesses are smart, they'll stop allowing people to sign up for things using AOL.COM addresses until AOL admits that they need to educate their users better.
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