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

At 07:27 AM 07/09/2004, Thornton wrote:

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

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

On Tue, 7 Sep 2004, Jon Lewis wrote:

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. 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/

On Tue, 7 Sep 2004, Christopher X. Candreva wrote:

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.

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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Lewis | I route Senior Network Engineer | therefore you are Atlantic Net | _________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________

Christopher X. Candreva wrote:

On Tue, 7 Sep 2004, Jon Lewis wrote:

...

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.

Grrrr.

So it's a nice idea -- but IMHO fails in practice.

It's still pretty handy but I agree lots of AOL users seem to think the 'report as spam' button must be the delete button or something. When somebody on our network gets infected with a spam trojan the feedback loop is pretty helpful in detecting it quickly. Mark Radabaugh Amplex

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.... -- Robert Blayzor, BOFH INOC, LLC rblayzor@inoc.net PGP: http://www.inoc.net/~dev/ Key fingerprint = 1E02 DABE F989 BC03 3DF5 0E93 8D02 9D0B CB1A A7B0 "Where's the ka-boom? There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering ka-boom!...Heavens! Someone has stolen the Illudium Q-38 Explosive Space Modulator! The Earth creature has *stolen* the Space Modulator!"

On Tue, Sep 07, 2004 at 08:14:05AM -0400, Mike Tancsa wrote:

At 07:27 AM 07/09/2004, Thornton wrote:

...

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. On Tue, Sep 07, 2004 at 10:59:20AM -0400, Christopher X. Candreva wrote:

On Tue, 7 Sep 2004, Jon Lewis wrote:

...

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. On Tue, Sep 07, 2004 at 08:12:22AM -0400, 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.

I could be wrong, and I don't know exactly how they do this, but I imagine that being unable to reach the DNS servers for a reverse lookup would be handled differently than a "rcode 3" (NXDOMAIN) response. Also, as others have pointed out, they don't block ALL mail from IPs that don't resolve - they just reserve the right to do so.... -- "Since when is skepticism un-American? Dissent's not treason but they talk like it's the same..." (Sleater-Kinney - "Combat Rock")