We’ve been notified that AOL has recently made some updates to their system and is doing a little Spring Cleaning! In a nutshell AOL is going to be cancelling some inactive mailboxes. These are mailboxes that have been abandoned by users but still receive mail. As we all know mailing bulk mail to inactive addresses is a good way to invite email delivery problems into your Marketing house. So AOL is doing everyone a favor by eliminating ‘some\’ of these inactive addresses on their end. They could easily turn them into Spamtraps and really put a hurtin\’ on honest email marketers but they have decided to simply delete these mailboxes (Thank you AOL!).
As a result, we at mobileStorm are going to be making changes on our end to remove these addresses from your email lists. Customers may notice an increase in AOL Hard Bounces next time they send an email campaign and it\’s possible that overall Active subscriber counts will see a slight decrease as well. Unfortunately mobileStorm has no further information on exactly how many AOL mailboxes will be removed on their end. Please rest assured that this will only benefit your email marketing efforts moving forward.
Changes will be happening starting Friday 7/9 and should subside once all bad addresses have been removed from your lists. How frequently mobileStorm customers send email campaigns to their entire database will determine how long this ‘inactive mailbox removal\’ process will last. If any customers have any questions about this please feel free to call us at 1.866.492.7886 (press 2) or email us at support@mobilestorm.com or hit us up in Live Chat from inside the mS system.
From AOL Postmaster:
As part of the migration to the new email architecture, some inactive mailboxes are being canceled. Our sender reputation systems were adjusted prior to this change so that the increase in invalid recipients would not negatively impact mailers. Please follow your normal procedures for removing accounts that repeatedly return as invalid.