False Positives at AOL

Pivotal Veracity's deliverabability tracking technology recently enabled us to catch an error with AOL's spam filters that has been causing a higher than normal amount of email from good senders to be placed in customers' spam folders.

On Monday, we detected that spam folder placement was 6% above average, and by yesterday that number grew to 13%--clearly out of normal bounds. Our ISP relations team reached out to the AOL postmaster group and learned that AOL became aware of the problem on Tuesday, and began taking steps to rectify the misconfiguration to their filters that has been causing this immediately. There is no firm ETA for when the problem will be resolved, but the team at AOL is optimistic that it will be within the next day or so.

Implications
Marketers should not be surprised to have experienced higher than normal spam folder placement over the past few days. These are false positives and when AOL corrects the problem, email emanating from domains and IPs that have recently been experienced challenges should resume being delivered to the inbox.

-Noah Hatzung, Client Services