OK, I should clarify this. The description that is on that link I put in my original e-mail doesn't actually describe what is happening, but that is the error they spit back at me. What really is happening is that the url that is in my e-mail and when you reolve it to an IP, if you do a reverse lookup on that IP, it comes back with a generic DNS entry that my colo provider has assigned to it. So the issue seems to be that the reverse DNS entry and the domain name don't match. But this isn't really an issue, a lot of providers do it this way. But why is AOL being lame with this? -Mike On 10/2/06, Matt Baldwin <baldwinmathew@gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, I'm noticing this too. Very lame indeed. Doing a quick Google on it in the Groups it seems that it was a feature that was enabled earlier this year. My guess is they turned it off, then turned it back on. Anyone from AOL care to explain this behavior and what should be communicated to the end-user?
Thanks.
-matt
On 10/2/06, Mike Lyon <mike.lyon@gmail.com> wrote:
Is anyone else noticing new AOL lameness that when you send an e-mail to an AOL user and if the e-mail has a URL in it but the reverse lookup of that url doesn't come back to that domain name that AOL's postmaster rejects it and gives you this URL: http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/554hvuip.html
This has to be new policty for them because it never rejected them before...
Ugh.
-Mike
On Oct 2, 2006, at 11:06 AM, Mike Lyon wrote:
OK, I should clarify this. The description that is on that link I put in my original e-mail doesn't actually describe what is happening, but that is the error they spit back at me.
What really is happening is that the url that is in my e-mail and when you reolve it to an IP, if you do a reverse lookup on that IP, it comes back with a generic DNS entry that my colo provider has assigned to it. So the issue seems to be that the reverse DNS entry and the domain name don't match. But this isn't really an issue, a lot of providers do it this way.
But why is AOL being lame with this?
If that's the behaviour you're seeing, and your theory is really the reason for it... odds are that it's a bug. Happens occasionally. The folks at AOL are usually pretty helpful - I'd suggest calling their postmaster group and asking them for help (there's a link for that on the URL you posted). They're the only ones who can help you diagnose what's going on further, I suspect. Cheers, Steve
Along the lines of "a picture is worth...etc.." an actual example of an e-mail that is sent out generating that error would be very useful. I'm guessing that, from the page at the URL provided, AOL has decided that banning dotted quads from e-mails will cut down on the spam and phishing scams. They very well might be right. Mike Lyon wrote:
OK, I should clarify this. The description that is on that link I put in my original e-mail doesn't actually describe what is happening, but that is the error they spit back at me.
What really is happening is that the url that is in my e-mail and when you reolve it to an IP, if you do a reverse lookup on that IP, it comes back with a generic DNS entry that my colo provider has assigned to it. So the issue seems to be that the reverse DNS entry and the domain name don't match. But this isn't really an issue, a lot of providers do it this way.
But why is AOL being lame with this?
-Mike
On 10/2/06, Matt Baldwin <baldwinmathew@gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, I'm noticing this too. Very lame indeed. Doing a quick Google on it in the Groups it seems that it was a feature that was enabled earlier this year. My guess is they turned it off, then turned it back on. Anyone from AOL care to explain this behavior and what should be communicated to the end-user?
Thanks.
-matt
On 10/2/06, Mike Lyon <mike.lyon@gmail.com> wrote:
Is anyone else noticing new AOL lameness that when you send an e-mail to an AOL user and if the e-mail has a URL in it but the reverse lookup of that url doesn't come back to that domain name that AOL's postmaster rejects it and gives you this URL: http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/554hvuip.html
This has to be new policty for them because it never rejected them
before...
Ugh.
-Mike
-- Jeff Shultz
On 10/2/06, Matt Baldwin <baldwinmathew@gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, I'm noticing this too. Very lame indeed. Doing a quick Google on it in the Groups it seems that it was a feature that was enabled earlier this year. My guess is they turned it off, then turned it
Drew the attention of a friend at AOL to this and got a reply quoted below - this was apparently an issue at AOL's end. Thanks to AOL for quickly acting to fix this. I've been asked by my friend to post this below srs [quote] We found a problem with the way URL's were being identified and have undergone steps to correct it. In the interim, the rule change has been backed out pending further testing. Thanks to all on the list. [unquote]
On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 11:53:56PM +0530, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote: ...
Drew the attention of a friend at AOL to this and got a reply quoted below - this was apparently an issue at AOL's end. Thanks to AOL for quickly acting to fix this.
I've been asked by my friend to post this below
srs
[quote]
We found a problem with the way URL's were being identified and have undergone steps to correct it. In the interim, the rule change has been backed out pending further testing. Thanks to all on the list.
[unquote]
All, this seems seriously NON-lame to me. Of course, testing and fixing the bug before it was put out there would have been less so. But think of this! A large company has actually admitted that it was wrong and backed out a problem! Isn't this what everyone always complains SHOULD be done? ;-) ;-) ;-) Me, I'm always doing it, but that's just 'cause I have to. ;-) -- Joe Yao ----------------------------------------------------------------------- This message is not an official statement of OSIS Center policies.
On Mon, 2 Oct 2006, Joseph S D Yao wrote:
On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 11:53:56PM +0530, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote: ...
Drew the attention of a friend at AOL to this and got a reply quoted below - this was apparently an issue at AOL's end. Thanks to AOL for quickly acting to fix this.
I've been asked by my friend to post this below
srs
[quote]
We found a problem with the way URL's were being identified and have undergone steps to correct it. In the interim, the rule change has been backed out pending further testing. Thanks to all on the list.
[unquote]
All, this seems seriously NON-lame to me. Of course, testing and fixing the bug before it was put out there would have been less so. But think of this! A large company has actually admitted that it was wrong and backed out a problem! Isn't this what everyone always complains SHOULD be done? ;-) ;-) ;-)
Me, I'm always doing it, but that's just 'cause I have to. ;-)
-- Joe Yao ----------------------------------------------------------------------- This message is not an official statement of OSIS Center policies.
I had users that appeared to be getting their email blocked seemingly because in their sigs, they write their phone number that stupid IP-Address-Wannabe method, like: 206.555.1212 As an aside, is this something that's the norm in other places, like commas instead of periods for decimals in other countries? I'd hate to sound critical if it was. It just seems that I know a large amount of very American people who have decided that phone numbers with periods in them somehow look more "hip" than dashes. I despise that. Can you tell? ;) --Rick Kunkel
On Mon, 2 Oct 2006, Rick Kunkel wrote:
On Mon, 2 Oct 2006, Joseph S D Yao wrote:
On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 11:53:56PM +0530, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote: ...
Drew the attention of a friend at AOL to this and got a reply quoted below - this was apparently an issue at AOL's end. Thanks to AOL for quickly acting to fix this.
I've been asked by my friend to post this below
srs
[quote]
We found a problem with the way URL's were being identified and have undergone steps to correct it. In the interim, the rule change has been backed out pending further testing. Thanks to all on the list.
[unquote]
All, this seems seriously NON-lame to me. Of course, testing and fixing the bug before it was put out there would have been less so. But think of this! A large company has actually admitted that it was wrong and backed out a problem! Isn't this what everyone always complains SHOULD be done? ;-) ;-) ;-)
Me, I'm always doing it, but that's just 'cause I have to. ;-)
-- Joe Yao ----------------------------------------------------------------------- This message is not an official statement of OSIS Center policies.
I had users that appeared to be getting their email blocked seemingly because in their sigs, they write their phone number that stupid IP-Address-Wannabe method, like:
206.555.1212
As an aside, is this something that's the norm in other places, like commas instead of periods for decimals in other countries? I'd hate to sound critical if it was. It just seems that I know a large amount of very American people who have decided that phone numbers with periods in them somehow look more "hip" than dashes. I despise that. Can you tell? ;)
Do those people also put "http://" in front of their phone numbers? If not, then AOL would reject any email containing an IP address in the message body for any reason. Kind of stupid if you ask me...I can see maybe boosting a score in something like SpamAssassin for that, but outright rejection? "Lame" sounds pretty adept to me. James Smallacombe PlantageNet, Inc. CEO and Janitor up@3.am http://3.am =========================================================================
on Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 06:45:46PM -0400, up@3.am wrote:
On Mon, 2 Oct 2006, Rick Kunkel wrote:
I had users that appeared to be getting their email blocked seemingly because in their sigs, they write their phone number that stupid IP-Address-Wannabe method, like:
206.555.1212
As an aside, is this something that's the norm in other places, like commas instead of periods for decimals in other countries? I'd hate to sound critical if it was. It just seems that I know a large amount of very American people who have decided that phone numbers with periods in them somehow look more "hip" than dashes. I despise that. Can you tell? ;)
Do those people also put "http://" in front of their phone numbers? If not, then AOL would reject any email containing an IP address in the message body for any reason.
You've never seen anything like http://foo.example.com * 978-555-1212 * 978-555-2424 (fax) * FooBar Ltd. in a sig? Now how about in spam? URLs in spam are often so broken they're unusable in anything but the most forgiving mail clients, but that doesn't stop them from being spam, and it doesn't stop others from trying to detect them despite all their brokenness. Cut AOL some slack - they've been very responsive whenever I have had trouble with them, and they've been very responsive this time. -- hesketh.com/inc. v: +1(919)834-2552 f: +1(919)834-2553 w: http://hesketh.com/ antispam news, solutions for sendmail, exim, postfix: http://enemieslist.com/ rambling, amusements, edifications and suchlike: http://interrupt-driven.com/
On 2 Oct 2006, at 23:39, Rick Kunkel wrote:
On Mon, 2 Oct 2006, Joseph S D Yao wrote:
On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 11:53:56PM +0530, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote: ...
Drew the attention of a friend at AOL to this and got a reply quoted below - this was apparently an issue at AOL's end. Thanks to AOL for quickly acting to fix this.
I've been asked by my friend to post this below
srs
[quote]
We found a problem with the way URL's were being identified and have undergone steps to correct it. In the interim, the rule change has been backed out pending further testing. Thanks to all on the list.
[unquote]
All, this seems seriously NON-lame to me. Of course, testing and fixing the bug before it was put out there would have been less so. But think of this! A large company has actually admitted that it was wrong and backed out a problem! Isn't this what everyone always complains SHOULD be done? ;-) ;-) ;-)
Me, I'm always doing it, but that's just 'cause I have to. ;-)
-- Joe Yao --------------------------------------------------------------------- -- This message is not an official statement of OSIS Center policies.
I had users that appeared to be getting their email blocked seemingly because in their sigs, they write their phone number that stupid IP-Address-Wannabe method, like:
206.555.1212
As an aside, is this something that's the norm in other places, like commas instead of periods for decimals in other countries? I'd hate to sound critical if it was.
Normal practice in France; Belgium too I think.
It just seems that I know a large amount of very American people who have decided that phone numbers with periods in them somehow look more "hip" than dashes. I despise that. Can you tell? ;)
--Rick Kunkel
Judicious clipping; hope I kept the right attributions... Ian Mason wrote:
On 2 Oct 2006, at 23:39, Rick Kunkel wrote:
I had users that appeared to be getting their email blocked seemingly because in their sigs, they write their phone number that stupid IP-Address-Wannabe method, like:
206.555.1212
As an aside, is this something that's the norm in other places, like commas instead of periods for decimals in other countries? I'd hate to sound critical if it was.
Normal practice in France; Belgium too I think.
It's normal in a lot of places. When you start to add in country codes, I suspect it's easier to type number dot number rather than plus number parenthesis number parenthesis number hyphen number and so on. I converted all my phone list numbers to that format long ago. It's just cleaner. Never thought about whether it was cool, or not. "Cool" is not on my radar. -- In April 1951, Galaxy published C.M. Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons". The intervening years have proven Kornbluth right. --Valdis Kletnieks
Etaoin Shrdlu wrote:
Judicious clipping; hope I kept the right attributions...
Ian Mason wrote:
On 2 Oct 2006, at 23:39, Rick Kunkel wrote:
I had users that appeared to be getting their email blocked seemingly because in their sigs, they write their phone number that stupid IP-Address-Wannabe method, like:
206.555.1212
Commas in AT commands and on fax machines mean pause. Not sure why space isn't a good enough separator for phone numbers. Periods are used as separators for sequences of three numbers conventionally in most European (ie continental) countries likewise the comma is used for decimal notation. ten thousand 10.000 ten and 51 hundredths 10,51 and for good historical measure: seventeen hundred sixty one M. DCC. LXI. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Joel Jaeggli Unix Consulting joelja@uoregon.edu GPG Key Fingerprint: 5C6E 0104 BAF0 40B0 5BD3 C38B F000 35AB B67F 56B2
On Mon, 2 Oct 2006, Etaoin Shrdlu wrote:
Judicious clipping; hope I kept the right attributions...
Ian Mason wrote:
On 2 Oct 2006, at 23:39, Rick Kunkel wrote:
I had users that appeared to be getting their email blocked seemingly because in their sigs, they write their phone number that stupid IP-Address-Wannabe method, like:
206.555.1212
As an aside, is this something that's the norm in other places, like commas instead of periods for decimals in other countries? I'd hate to sound critical if it was.
Normal practice in France; Belgium too I think.
It's normal in a lot of places. When you start to add in country codes, I suspect it's easier to type number dot number rather than plus number parenthesis number parenthesis number hyphen number and so on. I converted all my phone list numbers to that format long ago. It's just cleaner. Never thought about whether it was cool, or not. "Cool" is not on my radar.
-- In April 1951, Galaxy published C.M. Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons". The intervening years have proven Kornbluth right. --Valdis Kletnieks
Boy, this is certainly OT. But one more... I just responded to someone else off-list, but figured I'd paste it in here too. Essentially, I don't think it's a BAD way of doing it. On the contrary, it's certainly more consistently delimited than other ways. I just get a little annoyed with the American general public's motivations sometimes. (Although, I'm quite fascinated by it as well...) ---- PASTING ---- I had a suspicion it might be standard somewhere. Now if only the metric system would catch on in standard practice, and not just in the sciences. Despite the fact that it is standard in some places, I feel that the relatively recent American embracement of it is more a function of pop culture at work than actual practicality. I suppose if the end result is a more internationally standard way of doing things, I shouldn't complain about the reasons for doing it though... --Rick
On 3-Oct-2006, at 00:37, Rick Kunkel wrote:
Boy, this is certainly OT.
Yeah. Apologies for contributing to the noise, but since someone mentioned it earlier...
I had a suspicion it might be standard somewhere.
The ITU recommendation is E.123 (02/01), ITU article number E20897 in English. That document recommends that a hyphen, space or period be used to provide visual separation between groups of numbers; parentheses are to be used for sections of the number which are sometimes not dialled, but not in the full international notation which includes an E.164 country-code. E.123 also tells us how to write our e-mail addresses and URLs on business cards, except that it calls URLs "web addresses". At least, this is what I can glean from the many E.123 summaries I could find, since the actual document isn't available for free download. We're certainly lucky to have the ITU. Joe
On 3-Oct-2006, at 08:53, Joe Abley wrote:
E.123 also tells us how to write our e-mail addresses and URLs on business cards, except that it calls URLs "web addresses". At least, this is what I can glean from the many E.123 summaries I could find, since the actual document isn't available for free download. We're certainly lucky to have the ITU.
I was asked to pass on the following. On 3-Oct-2006, at 16:37, <Robert.Shaw@itu.int> <Robert.Shaw@itu.int> wrote:
I'm not a subscriber to nanog so please pass this on...
From 1 January 2007, all ITU-T Recommendations will be freely available in pdf. Currently this is supposed to run as a "trial" until the third quarter of 2007 when an evaluation will be done on its success.
rs
On Mon, 2 Oct 2006, Rick Kunkel wrote: > I had users that appeared to be getting their email blocked seemingly > because in their sigs, they write their phone number that stupid > IP-Address-Wannabe method, like: > 206.555.1212 > As an aside, is this something that's the norm in other places, like > commas instead of periods for decimals in other countries? I'd hate to > sound critical if it was. It just seems that I know a large amount of > very American people who have decided that phone numbers with periods in > them somehow look more "hip" than dashes. I despise that. I remember running across a standards document which defined it once... ITU, probably. Plus sign, country code, area code, number, space delimited. I don't have the energy to google (hi, verb-searching IP lawyers!) for it exhaustively, but here's one reference, third paragraph down: http://www.eeicommunications.com/eye/utw/96feb.html and here's another: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.164 -Bill
On Mon, 2006-10-02 at 18:30 -0400, Joseph S D Yao wrote:
All, this seems seriously NON-lame to me. Of course, testing and fixing the bug before it was put out there would have been less so.
Testing something like this would be difficult without duplicating everyone's email into a development system (thus possibly opening AOL up to a bad public relations or security problem). I'm sure that there were some initial tests. But given the complexity of differing emails it seems to me it would be hard to robustly test in development alone.
But think of this! A large company has actually admitted that it was wrong and backed out a problem! Isn't this what everyone always complains SHOULD be done? ;-) ;-) ;-)
Kudos to AOL for responding quickly, and for doing this on a Monday instead of a Friday afternoon. -Jim P.
On Monday 02 Oct 2006 23:30, Joseph S D Yao wrote:
All, this seems seriously NON-lame to me. Of course, testing and fixing the bug before it was put out there would have been less so. But think of this! A large company has actually admitted that it was wrong and backed out a problem! Isn't this what everyone always complains SHOULD be done? ;-) ;-) ;-)
Hehe, AOL also reject the URLs generated by the 'visitors' Apache log reporting program. I pointed it out, they fixed it, then the next week it had regressed. I think the problem here is trying to detect bulk unsolicited email by its content. Its like assuming all DDoS address use ICMP packets, sometimes it works, except people get angrier when you drop genuine email. Quite why AOL incorrectly rejecting email is worthy of comment on NANOG is beyond me, now if AOL stopped bouncing genuine email that might be worthy of comment, but not on NANOG.
In the near future half the net will spend half their time wondering what happened to half their mail. -- -Barry Shein The World | bzs@TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD | Login: Nationwide Software Tool & Die | Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Randy Bush wrote:
In the near future half the net will spend half their time wondering what happened to half their mail.
they won't have that much time to do the wondering as they will spend 90% of their time talking about it.
qed
randy
And while those laypeople waste 90% talking about it, of the 100% of the engineers in charge of routing, 70% will be quick to point out how offtopic this sort of a problem is, 90% of that 70% will be quick to point out the question was posted to the wrong list, 20% will have autoresponders answering. Of the remaining 30%, 20% will point to obscure RFC's not being followed as the root of the problem, and the remaining 10% will take a "Not In My Backyard Network" approach and ignore it. The thread will then offspin with a new topic "Re: This is offtopic (was What happened to my mail)" which will begin a whole new thread filled with a redundancy of "my Juniper is better than your new logo toting Cisco" -- =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ J. Oquendo http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x1383A743 sil infiltrated . net http://www.infiltrated.net "How a man plays the game shows something of his character - how he loses shows all" - Mr. Luckey
Email, as it now exists, has been reduced to an unreliable medium... "joe job" operators, etc., mean that people don't read bounced / returned email notifications any more (not that most of them are written in such a way as to be comprehensible to the average user circa 2006), spam filters often exist on accounts without people even being aware of it... servers filter mail before it even gets to anyone's inbox... or just block it at the SMTP server or network (such as via iptables), etc. etc., and filters can have unintended side effects that aren't noticed for an extended period (one of my compatriots realized that certain emails were being dumped into his junk email folder, which he didn't check, several months after the fact). I think many people don't even use email as their primary means of asynchronous internet communication - my kids certainly don't... the rise of social networking sites might very well be driven by the fact that they implicitly provide a functional system of authenticated communications and provide mechanisms for handling unsolicited communications. You could draw a parallel between email and social networking sites and other proprietary systems of communication, and the USPS and FedEx/UPS... email is the postal service of the web... mostly, but not wholly reliable, unauthenticated, and full of low priority or junk communications. ... and likely to be supplanted by future developments. Thomas Randy Bush wrote:
In the near future half the net will spend half their time wondering what happened to half their mail.
they won't have that much time to do the wondering as they will spend 90% of their time talking about it.
qed
randy
participants (20)
-
Barry Shein -
Bill Woodcock -
Etaoin Shrdlu -
Ian Mason -
J. Oquendo -
Jeff Shultz -
Jim Popovitch -
Joe Abley -
Joel Jaeggli -
Joseph S D Yao -
Mike Lyon -
Randy Bush -
Rick Kunkel -
Simon Waters -
Steve Atkins -
Steven Champeon -
Suresh Ramasubramanian -
Thomas Leavitt -
trainier＠kalsec.com -
up＠3.am