AOL Postmaster contact?

Sun Nov 20 05:39:31 UTC 2005

On 11/20/05, Mark Costlow <cheeks at swcp.com> wrote:
>
> Someone might look at the ticket Monday.  Meanwhile, I've got thousands of
> queued messages frrom users that are upset with ME because I can't get
> their mail to AOL.
>

AOL's whitelist + feedback loop is not really a whitelist

If the numbers theyre seeing on your servers get too high .. they'll
start rate limiting you down by putting in anywhere upto 48 hour
tempfailing of your IPs

The last time this happened to us, it got very quickly resolved when
we ran numbers on our scomp complaints from AOL to see what was going
on.

Turns out the reason was a lot of users with .forwards to AOL
accounts, then reporting .forwarded email as spam.  This email was
also going out through our standard outbound mail relays, and the
combination of our outbound spam levels (pretty low for an ISP our
size) AND .forwarded email tipped the balance.

So what we did was to set things up so that .forward traffic was
routed out a separate IP.  And we told AOL what that IP was and also
told them that the only thing coming out of it would be .forward
traffic.

They took that into account I guess, because the haven't gone and
4xx'ed us since we set this up (and when they do 4xx it hurts - we're
just over a third their size so there's a substantial amount of email
traffic from our users to AOL ..)

--
Suresh Ramasubramanian (ops.lists at gmail.com)