AOL Enhanced Whitelist Changes

AOL announced today that they are changing how the Enhanced Whitelist works. For those that don't know there are effectively two whitelists at AOL, the regular whitelist and the enhanced whitelist. The standard whitelist is open to any mailer who meets the basic requirements, the enhanced whitelist has historically been comprised of the top IPs with the lowest complaints of the standard whitelist. Emails that qualified for the enhanced whitelist would arrive to the inbox with links and images enabled and turned on. The enhanced whitelist isn't going away but according to Christine of AOL, the method by which IPs will be added to the enhanced whitelist have evolved.

The changes to the enhanced whitelist reinforce what the experts have been trumpeting now for a while: engagement is becoming a major factor in the filtering schema. Focusing strictly on the number of complaints one generates is no longer the answer to solving deliverability challenges. Rather engaging with customer and sending mail that they want to receive will generate positive reputations that will serve mailers in the long run.

We've long been championing the concept of engagement and have created tools that make understanding how engaged users are with a marketer's brand a science rather than alchemy. Engagement means knowing who you are mailing from the standpoint of how they will interact with your mail, which mail client they will use to read your mail and if they consider you and your brand engaging enough to file your messages in a special folder.

Cheers!
-Len Shneyder
Director of Partner Relations
& Industry Communications

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