Hello,
Does anyone have a contact at Yahoo that could help with a dns issue on Yahoo's end?
I'm getting no where with thir Technical Support number.
TIA
Hi Folks
We are an ISP in Germany and experience since this morning, July 27 07:00
GMT problems with all mail-in Servers at AOL.
They seem to refuse mailconnections, giving error message 554 for no reason
at all, since our servers are not listed in any RBL etc..
We can see, that they extract from the header the original sender IP of a
mail, instead of the one from the MAIL-RELAY-SERVER, as specified in RFC.
As these senders are from ADSL IP's, AOL refuses them.
This is definitely wrong by AOL...
Does anybody else experience this Problem..
Regards
Tom Quilling
Tom Quilling wrote:
Hi Folks
We are an ISP in Germany and experience since this morning, July 27 07:00
GMT problems with all mail-in Servers at AOL.
They seem to refuse mailconnections, giving error message 554 for no reason
at all, since our servers are not listed in any RBL etc..
We can see, that they extract from the header the original sender IP of a
mail, instead of the one from the MAIL-RELAY-SERVER, as specified in RFC.
As these senders are from ADSL IP's, AOL refuses them.
This is definitely wrong by AOL...
Does anybody else experience this Problem..Regards
Tom Quilling
Even worse.
Except from somebody@aol I could never ever send emails to AOL.
I do not even get bounces.
I tried
GMX
1&1
gmail
yahoo.ca
memor.net (.it)
wannado.fr
cyberbunker.net (.nl)
But dont worry, SPAM gets through. They block only emails 
Cheers
Peter abd Karin
What you have run into is called AOL's "second received line" filtering
If your adsl customer is infected, or someone who had that IP recently
[if a dynamic IP] is infected and his PC is originating spam and
malware .. AOL will block any email with that infected IP in the
headers.
Simple reason for this .. a lot of malware is getting quite good at
hijacking Outlook or other MUA on a user's PC [including smtp auth
credentials if any] and sending out spam through the ISP's mail
relays.
Please sign your IP space for a feedback loop from aol -
http://postmaster.info.aol.com/fbl/
--srs
hi suresh
thanks for the info...I was not aware of this...
I have filled in the form...
however we can see that AOL is even blocking IP's from fixed IP block, of
which we know, that these IPs have never been used before for sending mails.
we have activated some servers on those IPs for testing AOL...
so the suspicion is, that AOL is blocking whole ranges..
may be a postmaster of them is on this list....
regards
tom
You'll find them pretty easy to reach - contact information, phone #,
email addresses etc on their postmaster site.
One added extra that we have (not aol, as far as I have seen) is a
spamblock query page .. go to
http://spamblock.outblaze.com/spamchk.html and query your IPs there,
the ones that AOL is blocking. See what you get.
srs
I have to add my 2/100ths of a monetary unit, after having dealt with
aol repeatedly. Attempting to return emails forwarded from copyright@*
to my gmail account, with the complaintant email originating at aol
resulted in 554. At this point, despite having aol *unblock* my gmail
account from sending to *@aol.com from here with reply-to/from
copyright@* (after 20 hours of my time wasted, i might add... ~2 hrs
per call x 5 calls) I managed to get a whitelist on the domains in
question, which... unless you classify phpbb notifications as "spam"
have never been even remotely associated with spamming.
Now.. to prevent bs like this from happening in the future... this
email address (infowolfe@gmail.com) is the only email address
associated with me that doesn't reject *@aol.com with 550 with a link
to a page explaining that the user needs to get a better isp. I really
wish more people would stand up to aol and explain to them that their
spam filtering stuff is ineffective as well as annoying.
Allen Parker wrote:
I really
wish more people would stand up to aol and explain to them that their
spam filtering stuff is ineffective as well as annoying.
I for one really wish the service providers of the world had been willing to deal with the spam problem when it first arose.
That some are now beginning to as AOL is is heartening, but it is now too little, too late.
email as a useful tool is dead. Get used to it.
For the future of email, look at the history of Citizens Band Radio.
And ponder the significance of Gresham's Law here.
I managed to get a whitelist on the domains in
question, which... unless you classify phpbb notifications as "spam"
have never been even remotely associated with spamming.
The fatal flaw in AOL's feedback system is that it is user-generated, and users will classify virtually anything as "spam". It is actually quite entertaining to skim the scomp feed... ecommerce confirmation/shipping notifications, mailing lists they subbed themselves to, personal correspondence(!), etc. I have heard that the AOL mail UI puts the "report as spam" button right next to the "delete" button, which perhaps accounts for the error rate which (at least in our case) exceeds 96%.
That said, we still find it exceedingly valuable. Once we were able to build a filter-set to separate the wheat from the chaff (the above-mentioned bozo-generated errors and forwarders), the feedback loop actually performs as advertised & intended: It provides an extra mallet in the "whack-a-mole" game of finding the exploited web forms, compromised machines, etc.
AOL may have clueless users, but AOL's postmaster group has their feces amalgamated. I wish I could say the same for Yahoo, Comcast, MSN/Hotmail, etc etc. (ESPECIALLY Yahoo!)
--chuck goolsbee
digital.forest, seattle
> I managed to get a whitelist on the domains in
> question, which... unless you classify phpbb notifications as "spam"
> have never been even remotely associated with spamming.The fatal flaw in AOL's feedback system is that it is user-generated,
and users will classify virtually anything as "spam". It is actually
quite entertaining to skim the scomp feed...
They have a very large user-base, though.
In my experience (though I haven't been dealing with this as much in the
past year and a half or so), it takes a lot of user complaints to
trigger any sort of block, and it's also based on the percentage of
complaints to total mail. And that's only just one part of their
blocking system.
AOL may have clueless users, but AOL's postmaster group has their
feces amalgamated. I wish I could say the same for Yahoo, Comcast,
MSN/Hotmail, etc etc.
Exactly.
Keeping in mind that they are not only a huge email provider, but also
that their user-base is mostly not exactly tech savvy, I think Carl,
Charles et al do a pretty good job over there.
AOL was also one of the first big providers to publish their mail
acceptance guidelines and to make a really big effort to communicate
with mail senders. I remember sending a frustrated email to the AOL
postmaster a few years back (when they were first starting to do this)
in desparation over something or other (probably backscatter), and being
surprised to actually get a response from an intelligent human.
Dealing with their postmaster team can still take a while sometimes, but
they'll generally respond.
w
Keeping in mind that they are not only a huge email provider, but also
that their user-base is mostly not exactly tech savvy, I think Carl,
Charles et al do a pretty good job over there.
I think Carl moved on to other things in AOL.
Dealing with their postmaster team can still take a while sometimes, but
they'll generally respond.
Experience here is that they don't any more. I've got responses, but not via
postmaster@.
They still do simplistic blocks on content, i.e. containing certain types of
content will cause a message to be rejected outright, without any sort of
consideration of the other content of the message. I think that is a broken
model.
Some sort of port 25 block, but neither a complete block, nor guaranteed
delivery, but some sort of intermediate proxy. This makes life very hard on
people who are learning about email, or coming from elsewhere. I think what
was needed was abuse detection and some sort of walled garden approach, which
could have dealt with all forms of abuse, not just email.
I appreciate changing anything at all on that sort of scale is always
tremendously challenging.
I think Carl,
Charles et al do a pretty good job over there.I think Carl moved on to other things in AOL.
Correct.
They still do simplistic blocks on content, i.e. containing certain types of
content will cause a message to be rejected outright, without any sort of
consideration of the other content of the message.
...and so will over half the mail systems on the wire today. Welcome to the 21st century.
I think that is a broken
model.
Well, the *whole model* is broken. The old one, where we all trusted one another, as well as all the various new ones where we all try our best to deliver what our customers want while also blocking what they don't.
The abusers are successfully killing the very system they rely on, so I suspect that within a few years it will all be moot. In the meantime, deal with it.
Have you requested whitelisting and a feedback loop with them yet? If so, you wouldn't be having anything blocked.
--chuck goolsbee
digital.forest
seattle, wa
[original message edited for brevity--m.black]
The fatal flaw in AOL's feedback system is that it is user-generated, and users will classify virtually anything as "spam". It is actually quite entertaining to skim the scomp feed... ecommerce confirmation/shipping notifications, mailing lists they subbed themselves to, personal correspondence(!), etc. I have heard that the AOL mail UI puts the "report as spam" button right next to the "delete" button, which perhaps accounts for the error rate which (at least in our case) exceeds 96%.
I get the AOL feedback for my university and am also quite
amused what their customers consider as spam:
- Notification of acceptance of admission to the university
- Notification of financial aid award
- Personal replies from campus faculty to students
- Confirmation of employment application submission
Someone told me that it's probably a careless error when users
make these mistakes. However, my friend has AOL and when I looked
at his client, the Submit Spam menu choice was nowhere near Delete.
I have to agree with a poster who claimed e-mail is as dead as
citizen's band radio. I better plan for alternative employment.
matthew black
california state university, long beach