Oak Park Temple
B'nai Abraham Zion

1235 N. Harlem Avenue
Oak Park, IL 60302
(708) 386-3937

Through our close work with AOL's technical staff in a two hour conversation with their top-level mail staff, we determined that these messages were not being caught in AOL's generic filters, but that for some reason individual AOL subscribers' SPAM filters were considering the mailing list mail as "SPAM." These individual SPAM filters were introduced in AOL 9.0 and are set by each AOL subscriber. When we asked AOL why this was happening, AOL was not able to provide an answer nor did they say that the filters were "doing the right thing" for their users in this case. They did say that they could not fix the problem, but rather each AOL subscriber had the control to fix the problem on their own.

Thus, the only suggestion AOL's top level mail support staff could provide was that each AOL subscribers who was .missing. mailing list mail should:

1. Go through their Spam folder, and mark the mailing list message as "not spam" 2. Add the sender of the message each time to their address book.

In this way, AOL states that individual AOL subscribers "have control over" their spam folder and have to "train it" to recognize mail from their mailing list as "not spam." This means that AOL subscribers have to continue with this process for some time, until their personal AOL spam settings recognize the mailing list mail as non-spam.

Shamash realizes that these suggestions are "extra steps" for AOL subscribers, but since this is a "feature" of the mail spam-filtering provided by AOL there is nothing Shamash, or any other organization on the Internet, can do to fix this issue.

Many AOL subscribers have already trained their personal spam filter to accept mail from the mailing lists, but the few AOL subscribers who have complained that "mail is vanishing" will likely find the above information helpful.

We hope by providing this information to you, Shamash can best assist users of AOL learn how to use their mail software to get the email that they desire.

Shamash remains dedicated to fighting all spam, and also helping our users receive the Shamash-hosted mailing-list email they desire.