Re: Are AOL's MXs mass rejecting anyone else's emails?

[Will Yardley <william+nanog () hq dreamhost com>]

On Tue, Sep 07, 2004 at 08:14:05AM -0400, Mike Tancsa wrote:
> At 07:27 AM 07/09/2004, Thornton wrote:
 
> > Only thing you can do is try to call them but that probably wont get you
> > anywhere.
 
> Thats not been our experience at all.  On the 2 times we have had to talk 
> to them we didnt have much trouble getting through to someone clueful and 
> useful.  Compared to the other big providers I have dealt with in the past 
> they were by far the most amenable to working to fix the problem.
 
My experience has been pretty much the same. Also, Carl and Charles have
both posted here in the past, and are good escalation points if you
can't get the problem resolved by emailing postmaster at aol or calling
their postmaster number. Often, it will take a while to get a call back
from someone if the postmaster team can't resolve your problem
immediately - but my experience is that they will get back to you.

Compared to other large providers, AOL does a good job of communicating
with the community and documenting their mail blocking practices.

On Tue, Sep 07, 2004 at 10:59:20AM -0400, Christopher X. Candreva wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Sep 2004, Jon Lewis wrote:

> > I highly recommend signing up for AOL's feedback loop (aka scomp
> > reports) at http://postmaster.aol.com/tools/fbl.html.
 
> And you will also get random emails that your users have sent to AOL
> users, who then click on "Report as spam" seemingly at random.
[...] 
> Then there are the people who have mail forwarded from here to their
> AOL account, and can't get it through their thick skulls that "Report
> as spam" isn't doing a damn thin in this case.

The feedback loop, can result in a large volume of email, and yes - some
AOL users do seem to report anything and everything. However, I find it
very useful in terms of extracting some general information, both on the
spam that's getting forwarded through our servers (users that forward
their mail to AOL accounts) and on the spam that gets sent /from/ our
network.  It often lets us find spam and scams that would never be
reported to abuse@ at all - especially in cases where the spammers are
specifically targeting AOL users. Obviously, if you get a lot of
messages through here, it's worthwhile to come up with some code to do
some processing.  We're working on such a tool internally now.

Side note: scompfilter (http://word-to-the-wise.com/scompfilter/) can
rewrite the subject line to be a little more useful.

On Tue, Sep 07, 2004 at 08:12:22AM -0400, Robert Blayzor wrote:

> I'm not calling them out on it, I'm just stating that rejecting mail
> with a 500 series error due to a PTR record not being looked up will
> cause more problems and benefit.  Temporary DNS errors do occur so
> slapping mail with a 500 could and will reject legit mail.

I could be wrong, and I don't know exactly how they do this, but I
imagine that being unable to reach the DNS servers for a reverse lookup
would be handled differently than a "rcode 3" (NXDOMAIN) response.

Also, as others have pointed out, they don't block ALL mail from IPs
that don't resolve - they just reserve the right to do so....

-- 
"Since when is skepticism un-American?
Dissent's not treason but they talk like it's the same..."
(Sleater-Kinney - "Combat Rock")