On 11/20/05, Mark Costlow <cheeks@swcp.com> wrote:

Someone might look at the ticket Monday. Meanwhile, I've got thousands of queued messages frrom users that are upset with ME because I can't get their mail to AOL.

AOL's whitelist + feedback loop is not really a whitelist If the numbers theyre seeing on your servers get too high .. they'll start rate limiting you down by putting in anywhere upto 48 hour tempfailing of your IPs The last time this happened to us, it got very quickly resolved when we ran numbers on our scomp complaints from AOL to see what was going on. Turns out the reason was a lot of users with .forwards to AOL accounts, then reporting .forwarded email as spam. This email was also going out through our standard outbound mail relays, and the combination of our outbound spam levels (pretty low for an ISP our size) AND .forwarded email tipped the balance. So what we did was to set things up so that .forward traffic was routed out a separate IP. And we told AOL what that IP was and also told them that the only thing coming out of it would be .forward traffic. They took that into account I guess, because the haven't gone and 4xx'ed us since we set this up (and when they do 4xx it hurts - we're just over a third their size so there's a substantial amount of email traffic from our users to AOL ..) -- Suresh Ramasubramanian (ops.lists@gmail.com)