| A. | AOL are a royal pain when it comes to email.
They are renowned for being rather paternal.
AOL have filters to prevent spam that seem to catch an awful lot of genuine email. You're not advised of this, the email simply never arrives.
On a website now it is preferable to use a form for enquiries rather than list your email address. This is because automated spamware regularly trawls websites to harvest emails to add to their infernal mailing lists.
But as this enquiry now technically comes from a server and not a genuine email via an ISP, AOL will periodically block all (or just some) of these email enquiries.
AOL can periodically block all emails with certain words in. Spam itself being one of them. If i send an email to AOL clients with advice on how to target spam, i'm fairly confident they will never receive it.
Some times it's almost impossible to figure out what it is that AOL doesn't like. Once I had an email perpetually bouncing, so in the end I broke it down into ten seperate emails, this narrowed down the naughty words to just one tenth, but even then I could see nothing in this paragraph that should be a problem.
AOL can also periodically block all emails routed through certain mail servers. In theory it's a good idea, mail servers forwarding loads of spam are blocked, in practice AOL once blocked one of Freeserves mail servers for two weeks. It was nigh on impossible for anyone with Freeserve as thir ISP to email their friends on AOL.
AOL also has issues with some attachments, best to zip everything up.
The solution, when we start your site, I will arrange hosting with a company that offers SMTP services for your site. It can be a little slower, but it cuts AOL out of the equation.
We will set up your website email address within Outlook Express and you will be able to send and receive from OE without the worry that you're only receiving a proportion of the emails actually sent to you. Better than missing enquiries. |
