DAve wrote: > We have not chosen a course of action yet. It looks as if the only > *solution* is to not send any mail to AOL accounts. From a business > standpoint this is not acceptable. But, if AOL users will tag a > confirmation message as Spam, what's an admin to do?
For an outside-the-box kind of approach... not seriously advocating this, but an interesting thought experiment... 1) Visitor goes to your site 2) Visitor fills out registration info including their email address [EMAIL PROTECTED] 3) User clicks "Register" 4) Your web server generates a one-time disposable-use email address such as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 5) Your web server adds a row to a "Registrations awaiting confirmation" with these fields: Registrant: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Confirmation email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 6) Your web server gives the user the following instructions: "Two steps remaining. To confirm your email address, please send us an email from your [EMAIL PROTECTED] account. Send it to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- we will send you a reply with a link. Click on that link, and your registration will be confirmed." 7) User sends an email From: aol-example.com To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 8) Your mail server receives the email and hands it off to some kind of mail processing script. 9) The mail processing script verifies the From: and To: against the "Registrations awaiting confirmation" table. 10) If they match, the mail processing script fires off a reply: "One final step remaining. Please click this link to verify your registration." If AOL complains about that reply, you pull up your logs and ask them "how could it be spam when THEY emailed ME first??" -- Matthew.van.Eerde (at) hbinc.com 805.964.4554 x902 Hispanic Business Inc./HireDiversity.com Software Engineer
