If you are on AOL...or if you are trying to respond to inquiries from prospects who use AOL... you need to be aware of a serious non-delivery pattern with AOL. AOL's servers, in an attempt to filter out spam, are dumping thousands upon thousands of legitimate email messages every day. To a lesser extent this problem exists system wide with most ISP's, but AOL's problem is especially significant as they have over 35 Million users.
I now have several prospects who have been sent numerous follow-messages by me personally... and the myseasilver autoresponder system... that indicate to me that they have not received any follow-up from me. In one case I have had to fax information to the inquirer after sending multiple emails to his AOL address and finding that none of them arrived.
This is not an isolated problem. I moderate several industry discussion lists (Amazon-Affiliates) and the problem with AOL email has been plaguing us for months. If you are an AOL customer you should seriously consider picking up a separate free email address (Yahoo for example) and use the non-AOL address for your essential correspondence. Otherwise you may find that your business suffers because important messages are arbitrarily being dumped by AOL and other ISP's. You might also consider vigorously complaining to AOL for their filtering practices. In a recent article on the subject one AOL spokesperson bragged about the AOL system filtering out over 850 Million messages that day. I wonder how many legitimate pieces of correspondence were included in that number? How many of yours?
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