AOL Disabling Inactive Email Accounts

We've heard reports from numerous ESP partners and clients that AOL has been sending back large volumes of bounces due to the deactivation of old and unused email accounts. Although the exact reasons for what constitutes an inactive email account isn't 100% clear the numbers and reports we've been seeing range anyway from the documented 30 days in their Terms of Service (this document specifically applies to screen names but also appears to cover email) to 90 days and upwards of 6 months.

Marketers have to be very careful and take immediate action to prevent these accounts from receiving further messages because it can seriously impact their overall reputation and ability to deliver email to AOL domains:

• The number of hard bounces generated by an IP is tracked by AOL and other ISPs.
• Sending too many hard bounces is an indication of poor mailing and list hygiene practices and will negatively impact your IP reputation.
• AOL has deactivated old and unused accounts in the past. Once the accounts were deactivated they lay dormant for a period of time and then were reactivated as spam traps to monitor the behavior of mailers. Its quite possible that this could happen again with this new batch of deactivated accounts but AOL hasn't said one way or another as to what their plans are.

The deactivation appears to have started on or around May 20, 2010. Marketers should expect to see higher than normal hard bounces (due to deactivation) until they've mailed and received the bounces for all addresses in their house files that were deactivated. There isn't a specific bounce being employed for this, rather the two hard bounces normally associated with permanent failures:

550 Mailbox not found
This error indicates that the AOL Member no longer exists on AOL or the address is misspelled.

550 Mailbox not found
500 5.1.1 : Recipient address rejected: aol.com
Senders using scripts to remove unknown users automatically, should be looking for both the new error code and the old one.

Overall this is potentially a good thing. A healthy list is one free of inactive users and hard bounces. Consider this a kind of spring cleaning and get those hard bounces out of your mailing systems as soon as you can. If you are waiting for more than 1 hard bounces to mark an email address as dead, consider shortening that to 1 hard bounce for AOL bounces received in the last five days and going forward for a number of days in order to refrain from re-mailing the deactivated accounts.

Cheers!
-Len Shneyder
Director of Deliverability & Messaging
Unica | Pivotal Veracity