AOL and AIM mail

Earlier this week a question came up on a mailing list. The questioner recently started seeing an increase in rejections to @aol.com addresses. These rejections said

<redacted@aol.com>: host mailin-03.mx.aol.com[205.188.109.56] said: 550 We would love to have gotten this email to redacted@aim.com. But, your recipient never logged onto their free AIM Mail account. Please contact them and let them know that they’re missing out on all the super features offered by AIM Mail. And by the way, they’re also missing out on your email. Thanks. (in reply to RCPT TO command)<redacted@aol.com>

The poster was confused because the addresses were aol.com addresses that had successfully delivered in the past. He was unsure why AOL would be rejecting good aol.com addresses with the aim.com.
After some investigation and some discussion with a friendly AOL representative, the underlying reason for this sudden increase in rejections became clear. The mailer was seeing an increase for two interacting reasons.

  1. When an AOL user abandons their account, AOL converts the account to a free aim.com address. That is why the aol.com addresses were getting the aim.com rejection.
  2. The marketing group at the company who saw the rejections “dug deep into their database” and sent mail to a number of addresses that had not received email in a while.

The increase in bounces is the result of pulling older addresses and the @aol.com addresses getting @aim.com bounces is the result of AOL’s policy of converting abandoned aol addresses to aim addresses.

Related Posts

Changes at Comcast

I can usually tell when one of the ISPs makes some change to their incoming spam filtering just by my call volume. The past few weeks the ISP in most of my calls has been Comcast. And, what do you know, they have made changes to how they are filtering email.
According to their bounce message, Comcast is using ReturnPath’s proprietary SenderScore product to filter mail. Reports on thresholds vary, but IPs with SenderScores of 70 and below have been blocked with messages similar to:

Read More

SenderScore update

Matt has posted a bit more about the SenderScore Blacklist, following up on my post about the changes at Comcast. George Bilbrey, VP and General Manager, for Return Path followed up with him to explain a bit more about the blacklist. George says:

Read More

Changes at AOL Postmaster desk

The recent layoffs at AOL did affect the AOL Postmaster desk, and information I have received is that there was significant loss. As a result of the staff decrease, some changes have been made to the whitelisting and FBL processes. In order for a FBL to be approved it must meet the new FBL guidelines. In a nutshell, anyone wanting to get a FBL from AOL must meet ONE of the following criteria.

Read More