Yet another rotten move by AOL

Yes, I know you've probably heard the story of the hell the guy went through recently trying to cancel his AOL, but that's not what this post is about.

I run an email list with about 600 subscribers, so naturally I get bounces from time to time as people cancel their email accounts without unsubscribing from the list first. No great shakes. But I just now got the daily bounce report, listing a now-former AOL user, and the bounce message included this:

Last error: 5.1.1 550 We would love to have gotten this email to [username]@aim.com. But, your recipient never logged onto their free AIM Mail account. Please contact them and let them know that they're missing out on all the super features offered by AIM Mail.

And by the way, they're also missing out on you...
(16 bytes suppressed)

(The cutoff means that I don't know what the rest of their bounce message said because the machine which runs my email list kindly spared me from having to read it.)

Amazing. AOL is putting ads in its bounce messages now. Not a good way to win friends and influence people to use your products, guys. Geesh.