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")