Roeland- In my case, it was the Gun Owners' Action League (GOAL) which had a formmail script for new members to join on their web site (which ShaysNet hosts). The form was e-mailed to their membership chairman's account on AOL. Now, I'm not saying this is a good idea, but this was what they were doing. It appears that most people - even those who haven't read the appropriate RFCs - fully expect ALL e-mail to be delivered to the intended recipient(s). Speaking from my experience, people seem to regard e-mail as equivalent to USPS first-class mail and have the expectation that it will be handled as such. No one I know considers it excusable or acceptable that e-mail can and will be silently discarded by anyone other than the final recipient. Uh, anyone other than those in the AOL postmaster's office, that is. David Leonard ShaysNet On Tue, 20 Mar 2001, Roeland Meyer wrote:
How many businesses use AOL? Most AOLers are consumers and their kids. They don't have the same service expectations.
-----Original Message----- From: M. David Leonard [mailto:mdl@equinox.shaysnet.com] Sent: Tuesday, March 20, 2001 1:42 PM
Peter-
This is nothing new - AOL was silently discarding e-mail a year ago. What's worse, when I contacted them I was told that they have an automated system *which does NOT generate reports for the human postmasters* so the staff does not know what domains are being blackholed without grepping through the logs on scores of SMTP servers. I find it difficult to believe that anyone could run a business like that but, hey, they seem to have a lot of customers who either don't care if e-mail gets through or don't know how much AOL loses for them.
David Leonard ShaysNet
On Tue, 20 Mar 2001, Peter van Dijk wrote:
On Tue, Mar 20, 2001 at 01:36:02PM -0500, ken harris. wrote:
If the MSNBC article is anywhere near correct (yeah, a
what AOL was doing was black-holing any "high-volume"
big assumption) then source. While that
is a noble goal, the fact that any mailing list would fall into that category is pretty lame.
http://members.aol.com/adamkb/aol/mailfaq/dropped-mail.html#lists
This basically means AOL is violating the very spirit of SMTP - you say '250 message accepted', and you deliver it to all recipients you specified acceptance for, or produce bounces.
Greetz, Peter.