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AOL launched an official postmaster blog last week that is probably a must-bookmark site for any e-mail marketer.

However, let’s hope the quality of the information improves from the maddeningly opaque stuff that has been posted so far.

After the obligatory welcome-to-our-new-blog post, the second post gives mailers a heads up that AOL is tweaking its measure of how many non-existent addresses, or “invalid recipients” as AOL calls them, the ISP will allow before it begins blocking the incoming mail as spam.

“We’ve always factored invalid recipients into a sender’s reputation, but we want to give you a heads up that we're refining the process a bit,” wrote Dave, a systems programmer with AOL. “As such, we would like to remind mailers that high numbers of invalid recipients is a Bad Thing and will result in poor delivery and removal from the whitelist.

“Now, I know you, and you are asking, ‘What’s a high number?’ That’s easy. A high number is a number higher than that which we consider indicative of a good mailer,” Dave wrote. “If your invalid recipient stats are consistent with mailers similar to you, this shouldn’t matter much to you. If you generate more invalid recipients than mailers similar to you, you will see a negative impact on your delivery in the near future.”

Similar to me? What the heck does that mean? If I generate more invalid addresses than other fat, alcoholic trade writers I’ll get blocked?

And continuing in AOL’s new blog’s spirit of maddening opaqueness, a person in the comment section, also apparently from AOL, explained the infuriating lack of solid information in Dave’s post by saying that publishing a number would only give the bad guys too much information.

“It’s important to understand that telling people what line to toe isn’t really in anyone’s best interest,” wrote someone posting under the user name Madkins05. “That just leads to people gaming the system, and once that happens we have to start moving the existing lines or making up new ones...which causes even bigger problems for the people who are just trying to do the right thing who sometimes get caught in the crossfire.”

Would someone please explain how one would “game” a simple list-hygiene metric other than by cleaning up their file? Either a list is acceptably clean or it’s not, no? Why am I getting the impression that everyone who talks to Dave and Madkins05 inevitably ends up rhythmically thudding their head against a wall or on a conference table and sobbing?

Madkins05 continued: “What David is saying is that lines will be drawn based on how everyone who sends mail to us actually performs. That means that they will change over time based on everyone’s behavior and what you need to worry about is staying ahead of your competitors.”

Got that everyone? In order to get your e-mail delivered at AOL, you must hit a secret ever-moving target that is determined by the list-hygiene practices of what AOL decides are your competitors.

Yay.

Madkins05 leaves us with the following piece of advice: “The point to take away from this should be that if you are having delivery issues it’s because you’re behind the curve. If you make some improvements to your processes and you don’t see an improvement in delivery, then you aren’t there yet. We don’t expect anyone to be perfect, we just expect you to try to be better than the other guys. If you don’t know how well the other guys do...well...that sounds like a problem some sort of organization of senders would be better at solving than us.”

He ended the comment with a smiley face that I simply could not bring myself to reproduce. Message to Madkins05: This isn’t a smiley face issue; it’s a frowny face issue.

Here’s an idea: Mailers should start an AOL senders’ association in which a condition of membership is for everyone to vow to be equally mediocre at e-mail list hygiene. That way, no one’s “behind the curve.”

In any case, go ahead, bookmark AOL’s blog. Here’s a link: http://journals.aol.com/pmtjournal/blog

Here’s to hoping the posts begin to contain some actual information.