This is pretty clear evidence that AOL accounts are being transferred to the Oath / Verizon Media / Yahoo backend.
AOL has been slowly disabling their postmaster pages and I don’t trust them to provide accurate info any longer. I am also way of using the contact forms at AOL these days. It’s possible that no one is monitoring them.
Looks like the last of the AOL mail infrastructure is nearly gone.
The AOL postmaster team posted some information about the upcoming MX transition on their blog.
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I’ve seen multiple people asking questions about what’s going to happen with the Yahoo and AOL FBLs after the transition to the new Oath infrastructure. The most current information we have says that the AOL FBL (IP based) is going away. This FBL is handled by the AOL infrastructure. As AOL users are moved to the new infrastructure any complaints based on their actions will come through the Yahoo complaint feedback loop (CFL). The Yahoo CFL is domain based. Anyone who has not signed up for the Yahoo CFL should do so.
When registering you will need each domain and the selectors you’re planning on using. Yahoo will send an email with a confirmation link that needs to be clicked on within a short period of time in order to activate the FBL.
Microsoft’s SNDS program had an outage at the end of last week. That’s been fixed, but the missing data will not be back populated into the system. This has happened a couple times in the past. It seems the system gets a live feed of data. If, for some reason, the data is interrupted, then it’s gone and doesn’t get populated.
We’ve known for a while that AOL email infrastructure is going to be merging with Yahoo’s, but apparently it’s happening sooner than anyone expected.
The MXes for aol.com will be migrated to Yahoo infrastructure around February 1st. Reading between the lines I expect that this isn’t a flag day, and much of the rest of the AOL email infrastructure will be in use for a while yet, but primary delivery decisions will be made on Yahoo infrastructure.
The AOL and Yahoo postmaster teams are pretty smart so I assume they’ll have made sure that their reputation data is consistent, and be doing everything else they can do to make the migration as painless as possible. But it’s a major change affecting a lot of email, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some bumpiness.
If you’ve done anything … unwise … with delivery to AOL addresses, such as hard-wiring MXes for delivery to aol.com, you should probably look at undoing that in the next week or so. I’m guessing the changeover will happen at the DNS level, so if you’ve nailed down delivery IPs for aol.com you might end up trying – and probably failing – to deliver to the old AOL infrastructure.