We are an ISP and are experiencing problems with users on our service that send out mail lists. It appears that people that subscribe to some mail lists either forget they have subscribed or are not interested in unsubscribing. The "New" AOL interface has a button added to their mail system "Report Spam". Many AOL users are misusing this button. Anything and everything they don't think they should be getting they are highlighting and reporting as spam. This creates a real problem for people running legitimate lists. AOL strips the recipient from the header and sends the complaint back to the ISP through their feedback loop. We cannot identify the recipient and AOL will not tell us who they are so there is no way to remove them from the list. It's a never ending circle.

AOL's solution for us is to "personalize" the email either in the subject or the body of the message. What they mean is to put the email address of the recipient somewhere in the message body or subject so when the spam is reported, you know who reported it and can take them off the list.

Finally, the quesiton. Is there any way to insert any variables such as the recipient into an email that is being sent to a list subscriber, perhaps in the header or footer options for the list?

Anyone with any suggestions please let us hear them. This has to be a problem with everyone running lists.

Thanks

There is no way to send per-recipient message headers/bodies with IMail's IMAILSRV.  As a traditional list exploder, it sends one header/body file to an exploded envelope recipient list.

You will have to find alternative ways of sending list mail.  A Google for Windows-based list managers will give you several with the appropriate option.

--Sandy 

------------------------------------
Sanford Whiteman, Chief Technologist
Broadleaf Systems, a division of
Cypress Integrated Systems, Inc.

Defuse Dictionary Attacks: Turn Remote Mailboxes into Aliases on your IMail MX!
  http://www.imprimia.com/products/software/freeutils/ldap2aliases/download/release/

Thanks but that is not going to be a good solution for our customers. At last count we host over 4,000 individual lists for our customers.

I don't know what we are going to do about this issue. Perhaps its time to put it to Ipswitch and see what they say about the problem.

I understand your frustration, but there's simply no way that IMail is going to introduce a new functionality that's stable and free in shorter time than it would take you to implement a free or low-cost third-party alternative.  IMAILSRV has been fundamentally unchanged across four versions of IMail, and the only vendor-provided improvements ever under discussion (eventually filled by third-party products instead) were in bounce handling.  What AOL is asking for, however marginal a change it may seem to you, is not fulfilled by standard list exploders.  Personalized list blasters cause resource usage far, far in excess of that of list exploders, for one inhibiting factor.

--Sandy

------------------------------------
Sanford Whiteman, Chief Technologist
Broadleaf Systems, a division of
Cypress Integrated Systems, Inc.

Defuse Dictionary Attacks: Turn Remote Mailboxes into Aliases on your IMail MX!
  http://www.imprimia.com/products/software/freeutils/ldap2aliases/download/release/