Billions of AOL Emails heading to the spam box?

If Time Warner continues down the path of ad-supported services, there could be a major impact to those sending and receiving AOL email. The ads that are inserted within emails will almost surely cause SPAM filters to begin to trigger based on the sponsored content at the bottom of the messages without modifications to some of the bigger filtering tools such as Spamassasin and others. And this will open a can of worms as spammers will quickly figure out how to “imitate” AOL sponsored links.

AOL’s subscriber loss this year reflects that more e-mail subscribers are switching to other e-mail services anyway, but it still represents billions of messages.

If my in-box is any indication, typical AOL senders’ subjects will further kill their delivery once combined with in-message ads. Subjects like “website” or “site” or “need help” are visible on ONE PAGE of my Outlook in-box, all from three different AOL users. With Spam filters these messages will probably never make it through once ad insertion starts. Better start using good subjects now, folks.

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