Lots of reports today of a security problem at AOL where accounts are sending spam, or are being spoofed in spam runs or something. Details are hazy, but there seems to be quite a bit of noise surrounding this incident. AOL hasn’t provided any information as of yet as to what is going on.
Lots of people are reporting ongoing (RTR:GE) messages from AOL today. This indicates the AOL mail servers are having problems and can’t accept mail. This has nothing to do with spam, filtering or malicious email. This is simply their servers aren’t functioning as well as they should be and so AOL can’t accept all the mail thrown at them. These types of blocks resolve...
Last week at M3AAWG representatives from AOL, Yahoo, Gmail and Outlook spoke about their anti-spam technologies and what the organizations were looking for in email. This session was question and answers, with the moderator asking the majority of the questions. These answers are paraphrased from my notes or the MAAWG twitter stream from the session. What are your biggest frustrations? AOL: When...
Over on the AOL Postmaster blog, Lili Crowley announced yesterday that AOL has made changes to their spam filtering system. Specifically, more senders may be subject to blocking with CON:B1 errors. AOL’s website explains that CON:B1 errors indicate that an IP address is being blocked “due to a spike in unfavorable e-mail statistics.” This strongly suggests that a sender blocked...
And, in fact, they are. This time I’m seeing random reports of FBL failures. Some folks are seeing a significant (more than 50%) decrease in FBL emails. Other folks are reporting FBL reports that aren’t really FBL reports, but instead look like failed code output. If you’re seeing this kind of problems it’s not just you. As always, people at AOL are working to fix things...
I’m working on stuff for MAAWG so I’m really not all that up on what’s happening in the world of email recently. A lot of folks are commenting on my AOL post, and I’m hearing that queues are backing up and emptying as AOL makes changes. One thing people have been asking me is if they should retry mail to the addresses that are bouncing. I say yes, absolutely. Some of the...
We cannot help endusers troubleshoot AOL connection problems. Please do not call. Please do not write. You need to talk to AOL. We are not AOL. We cannot help you. Over the last few months there have been ongoing mail problems at AOL. These problems are all over the map and are resulting in a lot of delayed and unsent email. People are reporting a number of different error messages from...
A number of people have been seeing an increase in AOL bounces over the last few days. Some of these are the new rejection 554/421 CON:B1 message. This is, basically, you’ve topped our thresholds, back off. The other one is a bit more interesting. The error message a lot of people are seeing is 554/421 RLY:SN. Senders should only be getting this error message when they are sending email...
A reader has been talking with AOL about the mtain* responses that people were receiving. AOL has said both responses mentioning mtain-*.r1000.mx.aol.com are actually DNY:T1 bounces that are being presented incorrectly. Both responses should be treated the same as 421 DYN:T1.
A number of senders are reporting that they’re getting unusual responses from AOL servers. The responses include: 421 mtain-dk10.r1000.mx.aol.com Service unavailable – try again later 554 mtain-dk03.r1000.mx.aol.com ESMTP not accepting connections mtain-dk* are assigned reserved IP addresses. It looks like something broke inside AOL again, and lots of places are having trouble...
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