Fun new policy at AOL

Fri Aug 29 04:29:42 UTC 2003

Susan,

> It just ticks me off because I know there are a lot of
> others who will be in this boat.

Indeed, there are. I have numerous small customers that have either a
single static IP or a /29 block from {Pacific Bell | your ISP} and that
occasionally are blocked because either the block is marked as
residential or the reverse lookup contains the string "dsl".

However, trying to be pragmatic, this is a situation that will
eventually solve by itself: Since having {Pacific Bell | your ISP} do
anything about it is not an option, when these customers are trying to
email to {AOL | some ISP} and are blocked, they will try first to have
if {AOL | some ISP} to whitelist the address; if it can't be done they
will say "get an ISP that does not suck".

There are two sides on this coin; one is that indeed this stinks, but
the other one is that AOL receives several billion spams a day, so I can
understand that they're trying to control the problem with the tools
they have.

Curious, have you tried to call AOL to get the IP of the customer
whitelisted?

Michel.