I'm stuck with AOL for my email, and they've actually moved mail from people on my contacts list to spam.
In the very earliest days of the internet AOL (who actually preceded the World Wide Web) became by far the largest internet portal and email service provider in the world and retained that market dominance by providing free, easy access and virtually zero oversight. This made them very popular with spammers who would create an account, using false identities, use it to send tens of thousands of spam messages, then abandon the account and disappear in a few days — often in less than 24 hours. Complaints about spam were sufficient to attract the attention of federal and state Attorneys General resulting in AOL coming under intense scrutiny, punitive legislation, huge fines and court orders to prevent users from sending Spam. When the dust settled, what is left AOL is a tiny shell of what was one of the first internet empires.
As a result AOL has some of the most baroque and draconian spam filters in the
free world. Anyone who sends lots of emails, especially if those emails are prone to having a rich graphics content can find themselves on someone's list of suspected spammers, but AOL's list is arguably the easiest one to get on. (Google's is arguably second.)
