Docs Place AOL Users Missing Email??

This is a message i received from a fellow webmaster that was having problems getting inbound email to AOL Users! Very Good Reading! Original Date Feb/2002

About three months ago I had an inquiry from a customer who had sent mail to
a friend on AOL and they never seemed to get it. I had had no problems with
AOL mail previous to this. I checked the smtp logs and it always indicated
a clean transaction with aol's mailservers. I provided the smtp logs to the
client and told her to get her friend on AOL to get in touch with AOL customer service and ask what happens to her mail. She did...they blamed it
on all sorts of unidentified things...never solved the problem...never followed up.

About ten days ago another client indicated to me they didn't think their
mail was getting through to two accounts. I then sent an alert to all MY clients asking them if they had correspondents on AOL and was the mail getting to them. I was a little concerned it might be a problem with me.

Much to my surprise it seemed that some was getting through and some was not. The smtp logs on our side always indicated a clean transaction with a
confirming sent. I was a little alarmed...what the hell was going on? Before
taking the matter further I contacted Hector Santos to ask him if indeed the
smtp logs indicate "sent" that the mail was sent to the receiving smtp server. He said yes.

I then decided to get in touch with AOL, thoroughly satisfied I was holding
up my end of the bargain in the mail transaction. Well AOL's customer service is useless as we all know....One call to talk with a supervisor resulted in the statement "our system is operating normally"...implied something is wrong with you!

I looked up the administrative contact off the internic registration of AOL
at www.networksolutions.com whois.

I called that number and got an answering machine ...and surpirse surprise
the first two selections of the voice mail dealt with "are you having problems getting mail into AOL's system"

I left a message. I had a call back from a bright woman ********** about 2 hours later. She identified herself as one of 3 technical leads in
email.

The first thing she did was to verify there was no open relay on my smtp server as she said they won't deal with anyone who has open relays. I emailed her the logs of the "disappearing" mail as we spoke plus I tried to
send a message to her on aol.com and aol.net. The latter she received. Mail
addressed to her at aol.com did not get through. She said she would call me
back.

Indeed she was true to her word and called back a couple of hours later. How
long have you had that ip? 8 months I responded.

Well the upshot and confession from her was this. AOL unilaterally blocks
WITHOUT ANY NOTICE whole ip address blocks that they may or may not have associated with spamming in the past. There is absolutely no way you would
know this or be able to know if you are on those blocked ip blocks. Since
we do not spam or allow our clients to spam I was very surprised that ONE ip
address would be blocked without any notice just because I fell into a BLOCK
that others might have used for spamming.

Moreover I expressed my amazement that the mail was not bounced but simply
goes down a black hole with the sender outside AOL's system and the receiver
( a customer of AOL) none the wiser that their mail was being killed.

She solved the issue very quickly for my system once she released the block.

HOWEVER, I indicated to her that what AOL was doing in effect was unilaterally denying service to their own customers. I had clients who had
valid mail for AOL users and they weren't getting it. I indicated to her that it was incredible that AOL did not bounce the messages to a blockled ip
address...she indicated they did not do this because the spammers were so
smart that if they bounced the spammers would take another track immediately. In other words if the AOL customer had the misfortune to have
a correspondent on a system such as mine that somehow got associated with a
spamming block, then that AOL customer HAD NO IDEA that mail destined for
him was "radically excised" as she put it, even though it was valid and good
mail.

I have thought about this for 5 days. The implications are enormous. Ethical? Legal? AOL has implicit in its customer relationship a duty to deliver mail to and from that customer and to notify that customer if there
is a possibility he might not get all his mail and that AOL does indeed destroy some mail unilaterally.

I don't think this is very ethical and I'm not even sure if it is LEGAL. I
know I take my responsibility in handling my customers' mail in a very serious light and would never consider destroying mail without letting that
customer know I was doing it. ...and in fact if I unilaterally destroyed mail from a sender to a recipient on my system with complete knowledge I was
doing so, I'm pretty damn sure my customer could sue me to the ends of the
earth.

Given AOL's size and apparent dominance we all face the possibility they may
even attempt to close out small isps from their system. What was going on
for me, is going on for others I'm sure. It may be a permanent block, an intermittent block (like me) or a random block
but as they say a block is a block.

As I pointed out to Ms.******** how would AOL react if every piece of mail
coming into my system from AOL , I decided to unilaterally "radically excise".

I am so angry and upset over this that I think I am going to take it to the
Justice Department in Washington. I'm Canadian but my business extends into
the US and I feel this challenges the entire internet. If people cannot know
that their ip's are blocked in certain systems and there is no easy method
of verifying you are blocked in a system then the entire email system is threatened.

We all know the problem with spam. We all recognize it. But most of us also
know that the real problem with spam comes from systems that are poorly managed and attended. Smaller isps identify and kill spammers quickly (at
least I do)...I do allow responsible mass mailings to verified addresses for
businesses using my system but an individual who wants to send out 10 million get rich quick schemes gets no leeway from me. It is ironic that a
good deal of the incoming spam I deal with originates out of mass mailings
in AOL!

The real culprits in this are more senior people in AOL who have put in place these policies to block and NOT TO DISCLOSE and its those guys
watching their stock instead of their customers that get me riled.

So there you have the AOL disappearing mail story in a nutshell...I would
appreciate your anecdotal and factual feedback. I am not letting AOL off the
hook on this and I have email exchanges with **** that are more than a smoking gun that I'm sure Justice would find very interesting. Profit has
gotten ahead of ethical and responsible behaviour here.

And as of 08/04/03 they are still blocking this domain!

20030804 00:26:39 (0A18) HELO: Incoming connection: docs-1 [192.168.0.2]
20030804 00:26:39 (0A18) MAIL FROM: <xxxxsales@docsplace.org>... Sender ok.
20030804 00:26:39 (0A18) MAIL FROM: <xxxxsales@docsplace.org>... Sender ok.
20030804 00:26:39 (0A18) Accepted message from [<xxxxsales@docsplace.org>] to [ <xxojo27@aol.com>]
20030804 00:26:42 (09A8) SEND> DNS MX Query for domain: aol.com
20030804 00:26:42 (09A8) SEND> NEXT: [07214W] [0] dest: [xxojo27@aol.com] mx: [mailin-03.mx.aol.com]
20030804 00:26:42 (09A8) SEND> Opening connection with mailin-03.mx.aol.com
20030804 00:26:46 (09A8) SEND> Received: 554 please visit http://postmaster.info.aol.com. from SMTP server mailin-03.mx.aol.com.

And my freshfloridacars.com domain is being blocked as well! This is my Business! And deleting Valid Mail should be a crime! Received this from my website host this morning after opening a trouble ticket.

From: "WEBMASTERS.COM (s107)" <support@webmasters.com>
To: <ddoc@freshfloridacars.com>
Subject: Re: Re: freshfloridacars.com Support [S-139281]
Date: Tuesday, August 05, 2003 9:39 PM

Hello,

Since AOL wants to be your "big brother" with its NAZI like regime email policy, your service has been affected. The normal procedure for this type of complaint would have been to move you to another server with a clean IP range. But since you are already on one of those servers, the only option is to use your ISP's smtp server. This is just a quick change in your outlook express.

The problem is that AOL is blocking by company name now, not IP's. The block of IP's stored on your server have never been used before, and since the server is new, no spammers have been on it yet.

AOL has several lawsuits regarding this by multiple ISP's and hosting companies.

We are working out something right now with AOL but it is in my bosses hand and I wont know until he tells us.

Please feel free to contact us again if you have any other questions or issues. Thank you for contacting us.

Best Regards,

WEBMASTERS.COM
Support Team

On Aug-09-03 at 15:46:02 PDT, seller added the following information:

Please Note.. If you use AOL i am unable to answer your questions.. They have blocked my website hosting company saying i have sent spam in the past. This is not true! If you are interested in this car? Please give me a call at 727-458-2389 I have had 3 inquires from AOL members in the past hour and i can not reply to you.

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at ns27.webmasters.com.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

<xxxxxxxx@aol.com>:
Connected to 64.12.138.120 but greeting failed.
Remote host said: 554- (RTR:SC) The information presently available to AOL indicates
554- that this server has been repeatedly used to transmit unsolicited
554- bulk e-mail to AOL. Based on AOL's e-mail policies at
554- http://postmaster.info.aol.com/standards.html, AOL cannot accept
554- further e-mail transactions from this server for an extended
554- period of time. Please have your ISP/ASP contact AOL to resolve
554 the issue at 703.265.4670.
I'm not going to try again; this message has been in the queue too long.

Back To Docs Place Online

This is a message i received from a fellow webmaster that was having problems getting inbound email to AOL Users! Very Good Reading! Original Date Feb/2002

About ten days ago another client indicated to me they didn't think their mail was getting through to two accounts. I then sent an alert to all MY clients asking them if they had correspondents on AOL and was the mail getting to them. I was a little concerned it might be a problem with me.

I looked up the administrative contact off the internic registration of AOL at www.networksolutions.com whois.

I called that number and got an answering machine ...and surpirse surprise the first two selections of the voice mail dealt with "are you having problems getting mail into AOL's system"

I left a message. I had a call back from a bright woman ********** about 2 hours later. She identified herself as one of 3 technical leads in email.

Indeed she was true to her word and called back a couple of hours later. How long have you had that ip? 8 months I responded.

Moreover I expressed my amazement that the mail was not bounced but simply goes down a black hole with the sender outside AOL's system and the receiver ( a customer of AOL) none the wiser that their mail was being killed.