AOL holes again.

Tue Mar 20 22:17:22 UTC 2001

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 at 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 
> > big assumption) then
> > > > >what AOL was doing was black-holing any "high-volume" 
> > 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.
> > > 
> > > 
> > 
> 