AOL Customers

[Guy Fraser]

On Mon, 2006-10-04 at 17:28 -0400, CodeHeads wrote:
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> On Mon, 10 Apr 2006 17:59:49 +0100 Craig McLean <craig at fukka.co.uk>
> wrote:
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> > CodeHeads wrote:
> > [snip AOL rejecting mail]
> > > 
> > > Here is a little background.  The email was sent through forms on a
> > > website.  I have been messing with the headers of the PHP scripts.
> > > 
> > > I did a test of sending an email directly from my email client that
> > > goes through my email server, then it authenticates through my ISP
> > > SMTP server. When this is done it works. So that tells me that the
> > > headers on the PHP script are not correct or not enough email
> > > headers.
> > > 
> > > I hope I explained that right. :)
> > 
> > Hey, just pay them a couple of cents per email and all your problems
> > will disappear :-)
> > 
> > http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=15603
> > 
> > C.
> 
> LOL, that is a bit ridiculous of you ask me but what can someone do
> about it?  I know what I am doing about! Block all AOL users!!!
> 
> No other ISP is giving me problems, only AOL!  Oh well.
AOL are very difficult to deal with, the second last time I had to 
deal with them I had to threaten blocking all of their net-blocks 
from all of our net-block, I provided both sets in the ultimatum. 
Fortunately we are a large ISP and it was compelling enough for 
them to finally contact me the day I was going to start blocking 
them. It has been years since then and we had no problems until 
a couple weeks ago when one of my customers setup a mail server 
and was having problems with AOL. AOL was a huge pain in the butt
and would only respond directly to the administrator of the domain 
that was having problems {forget trying to resolve an issue with 
AOL, if you do not have an email address on the domain with the 
problem, they will silently reject your application for a feedback 
loop.} Turns out it had to do with invalid internal DNS configuration 
at the customer location. The customers domain was hosted on our 
DNS servers, but they were trying to host there own internal DNS 
server. When he configured his mail server to use our DNS servers, 
he was then able to send mail to AOL. AOL must process the headers 
to look for "spoofed" headers and reject messages where something 
does not match up. This was just another AOL mystery.