At AOL, we detest spam (unsolicited bulk email) and work every second of every minute to defeat it, as we feel it's the worst thing to strike man kind since the Ebola Virus. While we graciously accept any and all input in regards to unsolicited bulk mail, we likewise find it critical to tell you our policy about it, so that you God damned people don't send us so many unwarranted complaints about it.
AOL maintains a zero-tolerance policy against Spam and routinely files mega-million dollar lawsuits against virtually non-existent defendants, and always wins the favor of the courts. Spam is a drain on internet resource, and that resource must be reserved for equally unwarranted solicitations from AOL ourselves. Come on people, our stock ain't gonna buy itself, you know.
Spam is defined as any unsolicited, bulk message sent to your email account for commercial purposes. Let's go right ahead and break it down a couple steps further, if you don't mind.
Unsolicited - By signing up for AOL, you've automatically solicited a virtual landslide of offers, newsletters and promotional emails by virtue of joining the modern world. If you've been to a site, they got you. If you've given you're email address, they got you. If you exist, they got you. Mostly, however, these ill-reputed merchants are one of two things; 1) people we have sold your email address to, however illicitly and under the table that may have been, or 2) AOL ourselves in a most translucent guise.
If the email you wish to complain about originates from someone you've ever patronized, even remotely, even including AOL, do not report it as spam, as it will only irritate us and make us disregard future messages from you, regardless of legitimacy.
Bulk - In internet terms, mail doesn't reach bulk status until it's printed form would bury a small town three or four times over. The post office considers bulk mail to be anything that costs several hundred dollars to mail out and we're not much different. Only on the internet, hundreds of dollars can get you out to billions of readers. In pulp form, that's a lot of mail.
Unless the email you are recieving appears to be of a printed bulk sufficient to bury Terra Haute in their own deforesting printed pulp, do not send it to us, or you may risk being blacklisted like a pinko in the red scare.
Email - The message must be sent to, or originate from, an AOL account. Don't bug us with those Chinese or Russian messages that you got on your Yahoo! account, we don't care about those. Those don't affect us. Only messages sent from or to an AOL account, can we aknowledge before doing nothing about.
More specifically, unless you have an AOL FreEmail account, we don't want to hear about it.
To complain to a human being directly, go to our human response page.
