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More AOL Mail Problems

Discussion in 'Forum rules and information' started by flynnibus, Dec 19, 2006.

  1. flynnibus

    flynnibus Well-Known Member Forum Staff

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    Looks like AOL members or just AOL's software in general thinks our mail from the forums is spam. Previously they have just messed with the delivery of our mail, but now it appears they may be blocking it all together.

    This means any member who has an aol.com email address (and there are a lot of you) will probably not get notification emails or password reset emails, etc.

    We have started the process with AOL to try to allow our mails to be 'whitelisted' which means we are trusted and will not be blocked, but who knows how fast it will be done or if they will do it at all.

    I would encourage all aol users to consider migrating themselves to another email provider. There are tons of free web based email systems that are better then AOL and are less intrusive. http://gmail.com http://mail.yahoo.com etc.

    AOL is a major Pain to everyone. Do us a favor and run far away from them :)
     
    PDILLM likes this.
  2. Pats_fan

    Pats_fan Former Resident

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    Good luck with your whitelist request. My law school e-mail address has been blacklisted by AOL for at least the last 6 years. I can't send anything from my law school account (GWU Law) to anyone with an AOL e-mail address without it getting bounced.

    I know that GWU Law has known about it for years, but it still hasn't been corrected. Either GWU Law can't get their act together (a very real possibility) or AOL has been nonresponsive to its requests.

    Like I said, good luck!!!
     
  3. smheese

    smheese New Member

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    I have no issue getting forum email on my aol account.
     
  4. WesGurney

    WesGurney New Member

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    No issues here either for my aol.com email address (sure it wasn't legitimate SPAM?)

    On a sidenote, one really cool thing about AOL email is they support both web and IMAP protocol (which means you can check your AOL email using 3rd party email apps like Outlook or Thunderbird). This also means you don't need to have the AOL client installed to check AOL email.

    Now if only gmail or yahoo would get with the program and add IMAP support.
     
  5. flynnibus

    flynnibus Well-Known Member Forum Staff

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    Well considering the forum doesn't send spam.. I'm confident the mail sent by the forum wasn't spam :)

    Plus. the way AOL handles manges mail delivery is beyond recourse. With yahoo, I not only do I get the mail in the inbox, I normally get the mail NOTIFICATION before the sending webpage even redraws.

    With AOL, most forum members can't handle the password reminders properly because of the delayed delivery stuff AOL does.

    As an operator of a website trying to send legit email.. AOL is the biggest pile of dung I've had to deal with. Bar none.

    Gmail does Pop3 and also phone access

    Yahoo offers pop3 with its plus services and is integrated with several phones as well

    Obviously IMAP has advantages over POP3, but I really don't need an email client if all my mail is stored centrally and the client is web based and meets all my needs. Yahoo's beta mail client is incredible. Unfortunatly its crippled by stupid decisions on page navigation and changes in advertising compared to the existing product. Changes that are just unacceptable.

    As a user with several gigs of mail a year to handle and backup on my local Outlook client.. to have everything online and accessible anywhere.. I'd give up Outlook in a heartbeat. OWA is close with Exchange2003, but our IT group doesn't have the storage budget Google does :)
     
  6. WesGurney

    WesGurney New Member

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    Just out of curiousity, how have you been dealing with them?

    I can check my AOL email on my Windows Smartphone running Outlook - works great, I get my email instantly. I also don't see the delays you talk about - I just sent a test message from the forum and it instantly arrived to my aol.com email address seconds later.

    Not trying to start a religious war here, but considering there are a lot of people on here with AOL email addresses, I would rather try to fix the problem than just saying your personal opinion that AOL is crap - especially considering it works fine for myself and others.

    I know some contacts on the AOL email team that might be able to help you if you know that legitimate emails from the forum are getting bounced.

    Wes

     
  7. flynnibus

    flynnibus Well-Known Member Forum Staff

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    AOL has a whole infrastructure and policy setup on how to handle these things. Check out http://postmaster.aol.com/ They even have a dedicated help desk queue just for this topic. We've already been denied whitelisting once, and I have an open ticket with them to try to address it again. What's their turn-around time? 3-5 business days!

    They have a whole architechure about how to automatically combat UCE and their system is too agressive and intrusive. They also make you jump through serious hoops to not be 'the enemy'.

    You may have something else.. maybe the address in your contacts or something.. and its not consistant. I believe it kicks in more when multiple mails are sent (such as when sending thread subscription updates). Trust me, as the guy who responds to all the user problems even on this TINY forum.. no provider.. NO ONE.. has given me problems like AOL.

    I've had to manually set passwords on dozens of accounts because the password reset emails have a hard time getting to AOL users in a timely fashion.. so they try it again.. and then later the multiple emails come through and users don't click on the 'current' reset token, etc. Gotta problem with someone with their login? It's going to be an AOL address 95% of the time. This is from experience.

    This isn't new. This has been a problem since day one since we moved to a forum that more activly involved emails. See http://www.broadlandshoa.org/hoaforum/showthread.php?t=2693

    And then of course we have the problems with the crappy embedded browser. http://www.broadlandshoa.org/hoaforum/showthread.php?t=2706

    The original message was received at Tue, 19 Dec 2006 00:13:02 -0500 from localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]

    ----- Transcript of session follows ----- ... while talking to mailin-03.mx.aol.com.:
    >>> DATA
    <<< 421-: (DYN:T1) http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/421dynt1.html
    <<< 421 SERVICE NOT AVAILABLE
    ... while talking to mailin-02.mx.aol.com.:
    >>> DATA
    <<< 421-: (DYN:T1) http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/421dynt1.html
    <<< 421 SERVICE NOT AVAILABLE
    ... while talking to mailin-01.mx.aol.com.:
    >>> DATA
    <<< 421-: (DYN:T1) http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/421dynt1.html
    <<< 421 SERVICE NOT AVAILABLE
    ... while talking to mailin-04.mx.aol.com.:
    >>> DATA
    <<< 421-: (DYN:T1) http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/421dynt1.html
    <<< 421 SERVICE NOT AVAILABLE
    <dbues@aol.com>... Deferred: 421-: (DYN:T1) http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/421dynt1.html

    My incident tracking # is 172903520 :)
     
  8. WesGurney

    WesGurney New Member

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    Cool - glad you are doing the right steps to make sure the forum email addresses get whitelisted properly. I know AOL is a big proponent of stopping SPAM.

    If you still haven't gotten this fixed by the end of the week, let me know and I'll see if I can talk to someone.

    Wes
     
  9. flynnibus

    flynnibus Well-Known Member Forum Staff

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    Yeah, kinda ironic considering they were like the original spam central :) What percentage of aol inboxs were NOT spam? heh
     
  10. WesGurney

    WesGurney New Member

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    I don't know about overall numbers, but I can say personally I don't have a junk/spam email problem with my AOL account as compared to some of the other free email accounts I have used before.
     
  11. flynnibus

    flynnibus Well-Known Member Forum Staff

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    I'm talking years ago before webmail even existed. Back in the early nineties an AOL mailbox was the defintion of a spam pot! Your valid email addresses (like a university account or .mil account) wouldn't get anything. AOL? Under water. Its obvious that AOL must have been reselling its userlist and of course spamming you with its own propoganda.
     
  12. neilz

    neilz New Member

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    I had the hardest time getting AOL to understand that the church I was webmaster for in Ashburn (APC) was not sending SPAM to their members, but were sending out legitimate emails to members.

    Unfortunately, about 30 to 40% of the members were AOL users, and AOL saw a bunch of emails coming in from one location, all within a 15 minute period, then blacklisted the mailservers being used, Earthlink/Mindspring at the time.

    I spent alot of time, calls emails trying to get this taken care of, but do to some issues with the Earthlink/Mindspring servers sending out 'real' SPAM, I never did get it resolved until we moved the website and mail service to a new ISP.
     
  13. flynnibus

    flynnibus Well-Known Member Forum Staff

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    they just have the largest pile of canned answers and no hard data to back up their claims. Still fighting, but who knows the outcome
     
  14. neilz

    neilz New Member

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    Good luck ...
     
  15. WesGurney

    WesGurney New Member

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    Any update about the incident you reported with the AOL mail bouncing?
     
  16. flynnibus

    flynnibus Well-Known Member Forum Staff

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    The update is.. AOL doesn't have any motivation to do anything but go by status quo.

    Wonder if people will start suing them to validate their claims.

    They just go by the 'we have complaints about spam from you' 'set up a feedback loop'. Yet, I had already setup a feedback loop and have yet to get any indictation of complaints about spam. Yet all AOL will do is say 'come back in 30 days'.

    So obviously they have no intention of looking into facts, just know there is some flag (which they can not or will not prove) and read from the script.

    Know why? AOL wants to push their anti-spam technology where you pay for privledge.

    They are a horrible net citizen and should be avoided. Hopefully everyone will get over their ties to their existing aol.com addresses and leave them en mass.
     
  17. WesGurney

    WesGurney New Member

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    Steve - I sent you a private message regarding this, we can take this offline.
     

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