As a subscriber to T&T List using AOL as your email account, you are receiving this email which was sent to all AOL users earlier as a quick tutorial about how AOL reacts when our email is marked as spam, and the consequences to the entire list when that happens. I hope you'll find this helpful. PLEASE READ THIS TO KEEP THE TRAWLERS & TRAWLERING LIST ACTIVE FOR AOL MEMBERS . . . DO NOT REPORT T&T EMAIL TO AOL AS SPAM You are receiving this email today because you are a T&T list member who is also an AOL subscriber. We would like to ask for your help in keeping us on what AOL calls the Enhanced White List - a list that AOL maintains for bulk emailers with strict delivery standards. If we are able to stay on this list it will allow our emails to pass through many of AOLs automated Spam filters. AOL maintains various statistics it uses to minimize the number of unsolicited emails you receive. One of the statistics you as a recipient and member directly control is that of AOL users flagging our emails as Spam. This happens when a user clicks the [Report Spam] button when reading a list posting, thereby telling AOL he/she think the email is SPAM; AOL them chalks up another black mark against T&T. This historically has been something that occurred infrequently but as of late the volume has increased tremendously. Another problem is the workload involved on our end when an email is marked as spam. We are asked by AOL to take one of two courses of action when we receive a Spam notification. One is to contact the member and get approval to keep continuing to send the email, and if we dont gain approval we are to remove them from the list; the second is to unsubscribe the members from the list. Because we value our subscribers and realize that we get grouped accidentally in with other emails that need to be deleted we have always tried to get a hold of our members to make sure that they really wanted to be removed. But sadly the volume has increased to the point that it is no longer feasible for us to track whether or not someone has returned an email from us. So, going forward, if we receive a notification from AOL that a listee has marked a T&T post as SPAM, we are going to have to unsubscribe that person from the list. This is an action we do not take lightly. This same issue faces all of the Trawlers&Trawlering publications, including T&T List, Great Loop, Buy Sell Trade, Passagemaking Under Power, and Trawler News. We consider all of our subscribers a part of the Trawler Family and look forward to keeping you each and every one of you as a valuable contributor. So please help us meet our goals in staying in the good graces of AOL, and as a side benefit make our volunteer lives just a little bit easier. So, the bottom line is this: if you wish to continue to receive T&T List and the other T&T lists, please do not report our emails to AOL as spam; if you no longer wish to receive our emails, please unsubscribe following the procedure indicated by following the link to your list membership reminder sent to you every month by our list server. For T&T List subscribers, send an email to trawlers-and-trawlering-request@lists.samurai.com with the word UNSUBSCRIBE and nothing else in the subject or body of the message. If you have any questions about this issue, please feel free to contact me or our Admin Team spam guru, John Ford, at johnpford@mac.com. Please do not send your question or comment to the entire list. Trawlers & Trawlering and T&T are trademarks of Water World Productions. Unauthorized use is prohibited. -- Keep on trawlering! Bob McLeran T&T Listmeister