Re: AOL Blocking

From: Cliff Kurtzman <moderator_at_o-a.com>
Date: Tue 27 Jan 2004 14:44:14 -0600

"Bill B May" <billbmay_at_earthlink.net> wrote:

>Back in August or September, Cliff asked if anyone had solutions to the
>AOL blocking problem. I've been looking for responses, but have not
>found any.

Actually I did post a summary of our experience and its
resolution for the list. I have repeated it below. The
AOL postmaster that finally helped us resolve the issue
was Luis Angarita, ph. 703-265-6942

--Cliff


"Steve Werby" <steve-lists_at_befriend.com> wrote:

>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.

We finally got the AOL block on our mail server removed today, so
Online Ads subscribers from aol.com, compuserve.com and netscape.net
should now be receiving messages again. For the benefit of other list
members that might encounter similar problems in the future,
I'll recount what has transpired since my posting.

When we first contacted AOL at the number Steve gave above, the
individual we spoke with told us that the reason that the list
was being blocked is that not only do you need to have reverse-DNS
for your mail server (which is stated on their standards page, and
which was in place for our server), but that the reverse-DNS must
also match the forward DNS as provided by the server (which is NOT
stated on their standards page, and which should not be a necessary
or reasonable condition for them to accept e-mail). Nonetheless, we
decided to play the game, and worked with our connectivity provider
(Roadrunner business service) to get them to change their reverse-DNS
records to match our forward DNS on our servers.

The person at AOL that we spoke with told us that when we fixed
the reverse-DNS issue, that the email block should automatically be
removed. I'm sure you won't be terribly surprised to learn that
such was not the case.

So we contacted AOL again, at the number provided by Steve (don't be
surprised to wait on hold 30-60 minutes before reaching a human if
you call this number). This time the person we spoke with tried to
tell us our DNS MX records were incorrectly configured... which was
wrong. Then he told us that our server was being blocked because of
an unsolicited email complaint (if this was true, then one wonders
why we were not told this a week earlier when we first called). He
indicated that if they receive such a complaint, they try to
communicate with the e-mail sender before putting in place a block,
by sending an email to the abuse@ address for the domain. In our
case, the abuse@ address was not set up at the time that they put
the block in place. So the person we spoke with issued a trouble
ticket on the problem, took our email address, and told us that they
should get back to us in two or three days...

Yesterday (five days later) the block still was not removed and AOL
had still not contacted us again, so I started contacting some of
the people whom some of our good list members had privately written
to me as having the potential ability to assist in resolving the issue.
One of those people turned out to be an AOL postmaster that was
very helpful. He had someone calling us to work out the situation
within 15 minutes of my e-mail to him. We set up an email address for
AOL to reach us if there should ever be any future complaints, and
the block was removed effective this morning. And we have now put
Abuse@ aliases in place for all of our domains, and made sure that
any emails to those aliases will go to a person that will be able to
promptly deal with them.

Thanks so very much to all the list members that assisted with
suggestions for how to best resolve this problem.



Received on Tue Jan 27 2004 - 14:44:14 CST