A few AOL-users posted recently about emails to AOL addresses bouncing where etsy.com is mentioned in the email, even as a signature (here’s another thread mentioning this). Etsy is now aware of the issue:
RevolvingDork says:
It appears that etsy.com URLs have been blacklisted from AOL’s email service, causing AOL users to be unable to receive some automatic email from us.The good news: We’re in contact with AOL, and have begun the process of getting off of their blacklist.
The bad news: Past experience with AOL leads us to believe that this process may take around two weeks to complete.
If you use an AOL email address with Etsy, we suggest that you log in frequently to ensure that you don’t miss any conversations or sales notification.
We apologize for the inconvenience — we’ll update you when there is further news on the matter.
Posted at 2:12 pm, May 22 2007 EST
May 22nd, 2007 at 3:48 pm
Ugh, I agree it will take a LONG time to resolve this. Possibly more than 2 weeks, if they don’t satisfy every AOL demand. The AOL whitelisting process is very tedious, my employer had to do the same thing. (although we never had it so bad that even mentioning the domain in a signature got blocked)
Unfortunately usually how something ends up on a blacklist is by enough of their members flagging emails as spam. This must mean AOL members who are also etsy members are flagging emails as spam for things like transactions and private messages, the latter of which is an OPT IN choice to get email notifications!
But people can be stupid, they did the same thing at my work. They subscribe to something (which isn’t default, it takes a specific request on their part) and then report it as spam when they no longer want the emails, instead of just unsubscribing.
May 22nd, 2007 at 5:34 pm
Mystery solved. I wondered why my little sale announcement to friends bounced back the few AOL addresses. Bummer. AOL seems to have lots of problems as I have heard other horror stories from companies they have blacklisted (for untrue spam). Thanks for the alert.
Linda
May 24th, 2007 at 11:23 pm
Yeah. It is an ugly mess. I completely removed all mention of the “e” word from my signature and everything, and then got blocked for a few minutes (my whole account) for trying to send someone a link to a forum thread. It steeeeeeeeeenks.