I’m hearing from lots of folks that they’re seeing some improvement in delivery to AOL accounts. As everyone can imagine, the AOL situation has been a common thread of discussion on many delivery lists. One person even commented at how fragile the AOL mail server seems. My own thoughts are a little different. The AOL mail system is notoriously complex and integrated. Many of the folks...
I’m still hearing reports that AOL is still having problems accepting mail. I’ve also heard they’re still working on it. There is no information on when a fix may be finished.
There have been ongoing reports this week from ESPs and ISPs that AOL is having problems accepting email. People are reporting difficulties connecting to AOL MTAs and random dropping of connections. Other people are reporting random rejection messages that make no sense. A number of folks are seeing rejections claiming that the reason is a new IP when that IP has successfully sent mail from that...
Per Boing Boing: the AOL postmaster page was hacked over the weekend.
As of now the site is restored. But I’m hearing that all the scripts are still down. This means no one can open tickets, sign up for FBLs, apply for whitelisting or check the status of reports. I expect this will be fixed soon, but for now it looks like AOL issues are going to be impossible to resolve.
Yesterday Goodmail sent out mail to all their customers announcing they are ceasing operations and taking all their token generators offline as of 5pm pacific on February 8th. While this is a bit of a surprise on one level, I’m not that shocked. Ken Magill mentioned in August that Goodmail was on the sales block and rumors have been circulating for weeks about significant changes coming to...
Sometime last night, AOL managed to delete their MX records, causing mail to hard bounce for at least 3 hours, possibly more. Annalivia noticed, contacted the NOC, appropriate people were paged and the records are now functional again. This morning AOL seems to be having more mail problems, possibly related to everyone retrying mail that was hard bounced last night after the MX record was deleted...
I’m off to MAAWG next week and seem to have had barely enough time to breathe lately, much less blog. I have a half written post, but it’s taking a little more research to put together. That can wait until I get the chance to do the research. Instead I thought I’d talk about the North Coast Journal article “The Rise and Fall of a Spam Crusader.” It’s quite an...
There are a number of sites online that provide public information about reputation of an IP address or domain name. Sender Score – . Provided by Return Path. They collect data from some ISPs and blocklists. Using a proprietary formula, they calculate a sender score running from 1 – 100 for each IP address sending mail to their network. Higher scores means a better reputation. Can be...
Some news stories and links today. Spamhaus has announced their new domain block list (DBL). The DBL is a list of domains that have been found in spam. The DBL is managed as a “zero false-positive” list, safe to use by production mail systems to reject emails that are flagged by it. The DBL includes URIs (domains/hostnames) which are used in spam including phishing...
AOL is currently returning “451 4.3.0 <invaliduser@aol.com>: Temporary lookup failure” in some cases when they really mean “550 user unknown.” This message from AOL should be treated as 5xx failure and the message should not be retried (if at all possible) and the failure should be counted as a hard bounce for list management purposes. This is something broken at...
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