Bob Brown told us about his trials with AOL's Mail Controls:
| *Then* they try to rezubscribe to one of the lower-volume lists, or
| they complain that their zubscription stopped. One kind person wrote
| to observe that our web page hadn't been updated lately and to inquire
| whether I am OK. (I'm not. I have the flu.) I was touched by the
| message, but I *can't reply to it*! Another one sends me a message
| about once a month saying, "I did something wrong... I want to be back
| on the list." I remember this person from high school, I had a crush
| on her, but I can't help her because she has my mail blocked! I can't
| even tell her why I can't help.
My list attracts a lot of teenagers. AOL lets the principal owner of an
account set Mail Controls for all subsidiary screen names, and one option
refuses all mail from outside AOL. Often Mommy or Daddy gets persuaded that
that setting is *the* cure for email viruses or spam and rushes to protect
Junior or Princess from the big, bad Internet. Then the parent says nothing
to the child so that the child doesn't know; or the parent says some vague
thing about "AOL has a setting to keep your computer from getting a virus
through it, so I turned it on for you;" or the parent even describes it
properly to the child but the child doesn't understand the ramifications.
| OK, AOL... here's what I want you to do about this: Please fix your
| mailer system so that your customers can't send mail *to* a domain
| they've blocked. Give them a reasonable error message, one that
| explains how to remove a block, and let them decide whether to keep
| the block, but don't let them send me any more plaintive messages I
| can't do anything about!
Agreed a thousand times over! I called for that months ago.
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