The other night, I sent out about a million e-mails.
About 400,000 of them came back.
These were all to people who signed up to be on the Riverfront mailing list.
If you're one of those people, one of three things could have happened:

Ok, as promised above, here's what we've learned in the past few weeks about AOL:

AOL closely monitors their e-mail. If they detect a certain number of e-mails within certain time spans, they ban the offending party. The floating number, as well as the time span, changes on a daily basis. This is to further foil spammers who are trying random ways to get you to buy porn, get better mortgage rates, go to their on-line casinos, or buy Viagra, Cialis, Propecia, or Xanax.

It doesn't matter if you asked to be on any of these mailing lists. At one point, the magic number was anything over 20 within a minute resulted in blacklisting. Therefore, I broke down The Riverfront Playhouse e-mail list into 20 separate groups of 15 names, and sent one every 5 minutes. That means, it was taking me over an hour and a half to send out e-mails to send a simple message to anyone with @aol.com in their address.

Clearly, this changed since I recently learned that there is a block on anything coming from any name @riverfrontplayhouse.com. AOL has blacklisted riverfrontplayhouse.com.

The work around for this was to be white-listed by AOL. Okay, I thought. I'll play the game. I went through the motions. I filled out an application.

And I waited.

After 8 days, AOL sent mail to jack@riverfrontplayhouse.com to tell me that my request had been denied. When I called to ask why, I talked to Allen, who told me that they had sent a confirmation request to jack@riverfrontplayhouse.com, but jack@riverfrontplayhouse.com never responded. After 8 days, as per their procedure, they sent a letter of white-list denial to jack@riverfrontplayhouse.com. Guess which letter was the only one that nade it? The denial letter got here just fine, but the confirmation letter disappeared into cyberspace. Can they prove they sent the confirmation letter? No. They just did. You have to take their word for it.

So, now we're going through the motions again. Two days, and nothing has shown up. Wanna bet that the next denial letter gets here with no problem?

Trust me. I used to be a big AOL fan. And I hate spam as much as the next person. Computers are meant to simplify our lives and streamline communications. For AOL to force me to wait 100 minutes to send one letter to 150 names negates all simplification and speed. And now I'm blacklisted?

Do me a favor: if you want to receive e-mail from jack@riverfrontplayhouse.com, write to postmaster@aol.com and tell him so. I don't know if this will work, but it's worth a try.

In the meantime, set up another e-mail account. Or, better yet, get rid of AOL. AOL is one of the biggest spam machines on the Internet. They're slowing you down and forcing you to conform to their standards which change almost daily.

Thanks for letting me rant.

UP TO THE MINUTE NEWS REPORT!!!! AOL has once again denied my request... SIX TIMES!!! The first four times, I got the letter telling me that I was a shameless spammer and a menace to society. The last two times, they gave me a reason that I could understand: I have a residential broadband IP address, which they can't accommodate. I need to have a static broadband IP address in order to be white-listed. A static broadband IP address is something that starts at a price way more than the playhouse makes in a typical night. Bottom line: No more e-mail for AOL users. I'm sorry. I gave it my best shot. Apparently, if you're an AOL user, you are a star-bellied Sneetch, and the rest of us in the world are just your average plain old garden variety Sneetches. Wave to us in the back of the bus sometime.

jack@riverfrontplayhouse.com