AOL has updated their Postmaster pages with a new design and new resources for senders who are sending to AOL. If you are sending to AOL, use the updated site to sign up for the feedback loop, request whitelisting, open a trouble ticket, or learn about the AOL error codes and bulk sending best practices.
Yesterday I published an article talking about an engagement webinar hosted by the EEC and DMA. I made a couple predictions about what would be said.
Read MoreYesterday I mentioned that there were reports of a compromise at AOL. While the details are hazy, what has been reported is that people’s address books were stolen. The reports suggest lots of people are getting mail from AOL addresses that they have received mail from in the past, but that mail is coming from non AOL servers. In an apparent effort to address this, AOL announced today they have published a p=reject DMARC record.
I expect this also means that AOL is now checking and listening to DMARC records on the inbound. During the discussions of who was checking DMARC during the Yahoo discussion, AOL was not one of the ISPs respecting DMARC policy statements. I’m not surprised. As more information started coming out about this compromise, I figured that the folks attacking Yahoo had moved on to AOL and that AOL’s response would be similar to Yahoo’s.
My prediction is that the attackers will be trying to get into Outlook.com and Gmail, and when they do, those ISPs will follow suit in publishing p=reject messages. For those of you wondering what DMARC is about, you can check out my DMARC primer.
I was doing some research about the evolution of the this-is-spam button for a blog article. In the middle of it, I found an old NY Times report about spam from 2003.
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