----- Original Message ----- From: <jlewis@lewis.org> To: "Brian Bruns" <bruns@2mbit.com> Cc: <nanog@merit.edu> Sent: Sunday, October 12, 2003 2:16 PM Subject: Re: AOL mail server problems?
They're probably blocking you. Have you gotten many scomp complaints recently?...perhaps a big backlog of them that you/your abuse people haven't dealt with? Last time I dealt with AOL blocking us, that was the cause, and the result was mixed. Sometimes we'd get the connection closed as above, sometimes a 550 message telling us we were blocked.
Well, just to be absolutely sure, I checked the forwardings for abuse@, postmaster@, and a few others, all of which go to admins@2mbit.com. I haven't seen any mail from AOL support/abuse/tech/whatever to us (nor has any of the other admins). We are a very small and close nit group with very few actual users - stuff like spam, viruses, and mailbombs get noticed really quickly (we all have pagers/cell phones which get a message whenever the system detects something unusual going on). What I was discussing with someone offlist was that AOL has apparently been threatning to disallow connections from dynamic IPs for a while now, and they apparently are starting to follow through with it. Although my IP looks like a dynamic IP, its a static IP out of a block of /29 (do a whois on 68.78.10.168 and you'll see it belongs to Nathan Drook, one of the people here). This is one of those reasons why I hate DUL lists with a passion. Its not foolproof, and alot of smaller sites get nailed in this mess. Of course, AOL offers up no way of correcting these listings on their site, the postmaster site of theirs, or via the mail daemon itself. Whats very interesting is that the mail finally does go through after rotating a few dozen times between different MX hosts. Whats even more interesting is that when the mail did go through, it went through to an IP which blocked it several times before. I have no idea if its just because not all of their servers are properly updated yet or not. Who knows. *shrug* -------------------------- Brian Bruns The Summit Open Source Development Group Open Solutions For A Closed World / Anti-Spam Resources http://www.sosdg.org ICQ: 8077511