Re: Are AOL's MXs mass rejecting anyone else's emails?
Just a suggestion, but make sure that your mail servers have the correct reverse DNS. AOL has been rejecting mail for any mail servers that have incorrect or no reverse DNS entries. -- Rob Crowe rwcrowe@comcast.net -------------- Original message --------------
We're currently getting this from AOL MX servers:
64.12.138.57 failed after I sent the message.
Remote host said: 554-: (RLY:FA) http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/554r lyfa.html
554 TRANSACTION FAILED
Yet, after viewing their alleged reason for rejecting the mail, we can find nothing wrong with our mail headers. Wondering if this is a bug on AOL's s ide or if anyone else has encountered/fixed this issue to stop the bouncing mail?
-Andrew
rwcrowe@comcast.net wrote:
Just a suggestion, but make sure that your mail servers have the correct reverse DNS. AOL has been rejecting mail for any mail servers that have incorrect or no reverse DNS entries.
One would hope that they're rejecting the incoming mail with a 400 series error and not 500 series. -- 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 "Unix is simple, but it takes a genius to understand the simplicity." - Dennis Ritchie
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
On Tue, 2004-09-07 at 04:15, Peter Galbavy wrote:
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
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 Thornton Cierra Group www.cierragroup.com Efficient Licensing and Consulting
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, Mike Tancsa wrote:
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.
When I ran into this issue (a couple years ago), AOL's postmaster group had a week backlog on tickets...so I was able to call and talk to someone, but they couldn't tell me much other than to wait for a callback. 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. Dealing with those issues will very likely keep you from being blocked by AOL. In the mean time, the original person's only option may be to change the IP(s) they use to deliver mail to AOL. That's what I did while I waited for my week later call-back...and it worked. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Lewis | I route Senior Network Engineer | therefore you are Atlantic Net | _________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________
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, 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.
On Tue, 2004-09-07 at 07:59, Christopher X. Candreva wrote: thats because they think report as spam is the same as delete. they dont want the email anymore so lets click report as spam
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/
Thornton Cierra Group www.cierragroup.com Efficient Licensing and Consulting
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_________
On Tue, 7 Sep 2004, Jon Lewis wrote:
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.
Well, maybe I'm spoiled. :-) Thing is, our 'abuse people' is me. I used to measure the number of mails sent to abuse@ in <10 messages/month, and most of those are misdirected for westnet.net, or west.net, or westnet.com.au or . . . take your pick. As of now the bulk of all abuse mail is scomp noise. If anything I'm afraid I'm going to miss a real problem burried in the garbage. ========================================================== Chris Candreva -- chris@westnet.com -- (914) 967-7816 WestNet Internet Services of Westchester http://www.westnet.com/
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
I have had my mail rejected by AOL in the past. I found their error messages very descriptive and the AOL mail team very responsive. The problem was on my end and I found and fixed it. Have you gone to the AOL mail website yet? Go to http://postmaster.aol.com/ it pretty much tells you how AOL handles mail and why they will/will not block you. -Matt On Sep 7, 2004, at 7:15 AM, Peter Galbavy wrote:
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
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!"
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. Of course, AOL can do whatever they please....
AOL has a "may" in that caveat ...
Effective immediately: AOL may no longer accept connections from IP addresses which have no reverse-DNS (PTR record) assigned.
That should help you put things in perspective, I guess. srs
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")
participants (11)
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Christopher X. Candreva
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Jon Lewis
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Mark Radabaugh
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Matthew Crocker
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Mike Tancsa
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Peter Galbavy
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Robert Blayzor
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rwcrowe@comcast.net
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Suresh Ramasubramanian
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Thornton
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Will Yardley