Just a suggestion, but make sure that your mail servers have the correct reverse DNS. AOL has been rejecting mail for any mail servers that have incorrect or no reverse DNS entries.
rwcrowe@comcast.net wrote:
Just a suggestion, but make sure that your mail servers have the correct reverse DNS. AOL has been rejecting mail for any mail servers that have incorrect or no reverse DNS entries.
One would hope that they're rejecting the incoming mail with a 400 series error and not 500 series.
Robert Blayzor wrote:
One would hope that they're rejecting the incoming mail with a 400
series error and not 500 series.
Where does the 400lb gorilla lie down ? Whereever it likes.
AOL does pretty much anything it wants to. If they start 500'ing your mail, it becomes your problem. Unless you have a large budget and a good legal team.
Peter
Only thing you can do is try to call them but that probably wont get you
anywhere. If you have enough customers on AOL they can complain and if
you really have a lot could get it removed.
But for the most part your just SOL
Thornton
Cierra Group
www.cierragroup.com
Efficient Licensing and Consulting
I have had my mail rejected by AOL in the past. I found their error messages very descriptive and the AOL mail team very responsive. The problem was on my end and I found and fixed it. Have you gone to the AOL mail website yet? Go to http://postmaster.aol.com/ it pretty much tells you how AOL handles mail and why they will/will not block you.
-Matt
Peter Galbavy wrote:
Where does the 400lb gorilla lie down ? Whereever it likes.
AOL does pretty much anything it wants to. If they start 500'ing your mail, it becomes your problem. Unless you have a large budget and a good legal team.
I'm not calling them out on it, I'm just stating that rejecting mail with a 500 series error due to a PTR record not being looked up will cause more problems and benefit. Temporary DNS errors do occur so slapping mail with a 500 could and will reject legit mail. Of course, AOL can do whatever they please....
Thats not been our experience at all. On the 2 times we have had to talk to them we didnt have much trouble getting through to someone clueful and useful. Compared to the other big providers I have dealt with in the past they were by far the most amenable to working to fix the problem.
---Mike
When I ran into this issue (a couple years ago), AOL's postmaster group
had a week backlog on tickets...so I was able to call and talk to
someone, but they couldn't tell me much other than to wait for a callback.
Any network that doesn't already have it, I highly recommend signing up
for AOL's feedback loop (aka scomp reports) at
http://postmaster.aol.com/tools/fbl.html. This will give you a sort of
early warning system notifying you of spam issues on your network.
Dealing with those issues will very likely keep you from being blocked by
AOL.
In the mean time, the original person's only option may be to change the
IP(s) they use to deliver mail to AOL. That's what I did while I waited
for my week later call-back...and it worked.
Robert Blayzor wrote:
I'm not calling them out on it, I'm just stating that rejecting mail
with a 500 series error due to a PTR record not being looked up will
cause more problems and benefit. Temporary DNS errors do occur so slapping mail with a 500 could and will reject legit mail. Of
course, AOL can do whatever they please....
AOL has a "may" in that caveat ...
Effective immediately: AOL may no longer accept connections from IP
addresses which have no reverse-DNS (PTR record) assigned.
That should help you put things in perspective, I guess.
srs
And you will also get random emails that your users have sent to AOL users,
who then click on "Report as spam" seemingly at random.
I've received Spam reports on e-mail asking when someone's kids should be
picked up at school, giving directions for a job interview, CONGRATULATING
that same person on being accepted for the job, and in once case received
a 'spam complaint' on every mail my user sent as part of a conversation.
As in, the AOL user replied, then clicked "Report as spam". He received a
reply to his reply, replied, and Reported as Spam. This was not a "Stop
e-mailing me" conversation. It was a perfectly normal conversation between
two people.
Then there are the people who have mail forwarded from here to their AOL
account, and can't get it through their thick skulls that "Report as spam"
isn't doing a damn thin in this case.
Grrrr.
So it's a nice idea -- but IMHO fails in practice.
> Any network that doesn't already have it, I highly recommend signing up
> for AOL's feedback loop (aka scomp reports) at
> http://postmaster.aol.com/tools/fbl.html. This will give you a sort of
> early warning system notifying you of spam issues on your network.And you will also get random emails that your users have sent to AOL users,
who then click on "Report as spam" seemingly at random.I've received Spam reports on e-mail asking when someone's kids should be
picked up at school, giving directions for a job interview, CONGRATULATING
that same person on being accepted for the job, and in once case received
a 'spam complaint' on every mail my user sent as part of a conversation.As in, the AOL user replied, then clicked "Report as spam". He received a
reply to his reply, replied, and Reported as Spam. This was not a "Stop
e-mailing me" conversation. It was a perfectly normal conversation between
two people.Then there are the people who have mail forwarded from here to their AOL
account, and can't get it through their thick skulls that "Report as spam"
isn't doing a damn thin in this case.
thats because they think report as spam is the same as delete. they dont
want the email anymore so lets click report as spam
Grrrr.
So it's a nice idea -- but IMHO fails in practice.
==========================================================
Chris Candreva -- chris@westnet.com -- (914) 967-7816
WestNet Internet Services of Westchester
http://www.westnet.com/
Thornton
Cierra Group
www.cierragroup.com
Efficient Licensing and Consulting
Yeah...there's a certain amount of GIGO since the scomp system relies on
the lusers to decide what's spam and what's not...but that's not a serious
problem. IME, AOL won't block you unless you're getting thousands of
scomp complaints/day and seem to be ignoring them. A handful of bogus
ones are just a few messages your abuse people can delete when they see
the mail appears to not really be spam.
If they're going to block us, I'd much rather be signed up for scomp and
be able to see that abuse fell asleep and ignored 5k complaints/day for a
few days, and therefore understand why we're being blocked than have to
call them and wait a week for a callback to possibly find out why we're
blocked.
Well, maybe I'm spoiled. 
Thing is, our 'abuse people' is me. I used to
measure the number of mails sent to abuse@ in <10 messages/month, and most
of those are misdirected for westnet.net, or west.net, or westnet.com.au or
. . . take your pick.
As of now the bulk of all abuse mail is scomp noise. If anything I'm afraid
I'm going to miss a real problem burried in the garbage.
> Only thing you can do is try to call them but that probably wont get you
> anywhere.
Thats not been our experience at all. On the 2 times we have had to talk
to them we didnt have much trouble getting through to someone clueful and
useful. Compared to the other big providers I have dealt with in the past
they were by far the most amenable to working to fix the problem.
My experience has been pretty much the same. Also, Carl and Charles have
both posted here in the past, and are good escalation points if you
can't get the problem resolved by emailing postmaster at aol or calling
their postmaster number. Often, it will take a while to get a call back
from someone if the postmaster team can't resolve your problem
immediately - but my experience is that they will get back to you.
Compared to other large providers, AOL does a good job of communicating
with the community and documenting their mail blocking practices.
> I highly recommend signing up for AOL's feedback loop (aka scomp
> reports) at http://postmaster.aol.com/tools/fbl.html.
And you will also get random emails that your users have sent to AOL
users, who then click on "Report as spam" seemingly at random.
[...]
Then there are the people who have mail forwarded from here to their
AOL account, and can't get it through their thick skulls that "Report
as spam" isn't doing a damn thin in this case.
The feedback loop, can result in a large volume of email, and yes - some
AOL users do seem to report anything and everything. However, I find it
very useful in terms of extracting some general information, both on the
spam that's getting forwarded through our servers (users that forward
their mail to AOL accounts) and on the spam that gets sent /from/ our
network. It often lets us find spam and scams that would never be
reported to abuse@ at all - especially in cases where the spammers are
specifically targeting AOL users. Obviously, if you get a lot of
messages through here, it's worthwhile to come up with some code to do
some processing. We're working on such a tool internally now.
Side note: scompfilter (http://word-to-the-wise.com/scompfilter/) can
rewrite the subject line to be a little more useful.
Christopher X. Candreva wrote: