Re: AOL Mail Problem

[Simon Waters <simonw () zynet net>]

On Thursday 27 Jul 2006 17:59, William Yardley wrote:
> Keeping in mind that they are not only a huge email provider, but also
> that their user-base is mostly not exactly tech savvy, I think Carl,
> Charles et al do a pretty good job over there.

I think Carl moved on to other things in AOL.

> Dealing with their postmaster team can still take a while sometimes, but
> they'll generally respond.

Experience here is that they don't any more. I've got responses, but not via 
postmaster@.

They still do simplistic blocks on content, i.e. containing certain types of 
content will cause a message to be rejected outright, without any sort of 
consideration of the other content of the message. I think that is a broken 
model.

Some sort of port 25 block, but neither a complete block, nor guaranteed 
delivery, but some sort of intermediate proxy. This makes life very hard on 
people who are learning about email, or coming from elsewhere. I think what 
was needed was abuse detection and some sort of walled garden approach, which 
could have dealt with all forms of abuse, not just email.

I appreciate changing anything at all on that sort of scale is always 
tremendously challenging.