Re: AOL Blocking of this list
"Cliff Kurtzman" <moderator_at_o-a.com> wrote:
> I'm fairly certain that the problem is due to
> AOL blocking instead. Does anyone have any ideas of how
> to deal with the situation?
Cliff, I suspect your mail server has been blocked by AOL. This has
happened to several of my clients, typically due to complaints from AOL
customers or mail servers with no reverse DNS records (something they
ignored until a couple of months ago). See
http://postmaster.info.aol.com/standards.html for a list of reasons email
from your list may have been blocked. In each case I've contacted AOL at
703.265.4670 and the mail servers were eventually removed from their block
list after making necessary changes on my clients' servers and/or explaining
the situation.
BTW, your domain o-a.com (.203) and mail server maggie.tenagra.com (.204)
both have valid reverse DNS so you can rule that out as the culprit.
In one particularly frustrating case a client's server was blocked for
several days because several AOL customers reported email delivered to their
AOL account as spam and my client's server was blocked even though it did
not send the spam. The customers had email accounts hosted on my client's
server, but had the accounts setup to forward all email to their AOL email
boxes. AOL apparently doesn't properly analyze the email headers or
penalizes all email relays, not just the original email relay. This should
scare a lot of people because it basically means that one AOL customer can
effectively cause a mail server to be blocked (I know of several peers who
have experienced this as well).
On the bright side, AOL does allow you to have the reported emails forwarded
to you *if* you know to ask to have a "feedback loop" setup, though any
emails reported *before* the feedback loop is setup are not sent to you.
If you have any questions feel free to contact me at my non-list address
(remove -list from my email address).
I hope that you'll post this to the list since the information might be
useful to others since I suspect other list members will be victim to AOL's
blocking, at least based on how often my clients (who do not send
unsolicited bulk email) are affected.
--
Steve Werby
President, Befriend Internet Services LLC
http://www.befriend.com/
Received on Wed Aug 20 2003 - 10:28:27 CDT
