Resolved: Attn. AOL and cs.com users: Email not getting through
 

Late Friday night, AOL's email servers started refusing to accept most of the email from LE's mail server to AOL email addresses. They are letting a few emails get through here and there, but they've refused our email 1156 times so far. Right now, there are 25 emails waiting to get through (we retry every so often). The reject mesage refers to the following URL: http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/421rlynw.html So it appears that some LE+AOL members have clicked the "this is spam" button when reading email from the LE system.

If you are using an AOL email address and this is affecting you, you can help by contacting AOL support and let them know that we are getting referred to the above URL and ask them to unblock our email server and allow your email to come through. Our email server has an IP address of 206.123.203.243.

Heh well I called AOL's postmaster group and they are about as helpful as dirt. They refuse to do anything about the problem until I get enrolled in some program that will apparently let me see what emails people are clicking "this is spam" on and respond to them or something. And they say it will take around 3 days before they will finish the enrollment of that program.

My advice: If you want to receive emails from the site, find a different internet provider. Or at least, a different email provider... This isn't the first time they've done stuff like this.

This seems to have cleared up. The are now accepting our emails as soon as we send them. I still never heard back from them about enrollment in that feedback loop program.

HI Jason, Sorry I missed this thread earlier....
I was the Tech Support Supervisor for AOL here in Jacksonville, until July 2004 when they outsourced all of email Technical support (and my entire departments' jobs) to Bangalore, India. Really nice when you train your "backup" and they replace you, huh? I sent my 3 best people out there to teach them what we did so we could close our overnight shift, only to be closed out completely!

I was one of the key points in pocessing these "blocked email" issues before they closed us down. Now the process gets routed from India, thru Tucson or Albuquerque (both Call Centers of which I spent time in), then to corporate (if ever) for resolution.

Unfortunately, this type of complaint gets NO response when made by people who host a forum, but DOES get big time attention when hundreds of paying customers threaten to quit. SO the best thing to be done is encourage members to SPAM AOL until they clear up the block.

AOL has always had issues, and now, economic pressures have made the service miserable....

AOL also owns Netscape, but it works better and has WAY fewer problems. IT may be an option for some. I suggest, as you do, that they find another email/pop server and download a dependable Anti virus/Anti spam program to protect themselves so they can get their mail dependably.

BTW about the "feedback loop"... Whitelist apps are for businesses that send out bulk email. I really don't think that is something you should ever "have" to contend with, as most are cleared up by member demand!
Hugs
Lynnie

Bah they started blocking our mail again this afternoon with the same reason message. I have no idea why. I got 'accepted' to the feedback loop program yesterday morning, but I haven't been notified about any spam reports or anything.

Yep Jason , anything sent to AoL from the LampworkSource realm is also being rejected and I'm having to use my RR address to get the AoL peeps their mail. So if your on AOL and haven't gotten a email that you were suppose to, you now know why. I also called and I might as well have been talking to my 4 year old. My mom is a die hard AoL users so she called and my mail from the LS domain went right thru soooooo , lol , go figure. Dern Servers!! 8)

AOL and CS are the same company, along with NEtscape dialup...

OK AOL'ers
 

Get your typing fingers out and start Spamming AOL to FIX this... it SUCKS!

I just tried emailing abuse@aol.com and postmaster@aol.com.. and my email to those is being temp-rejected too with the same error.

ohh wait maybe i can do some routing and vpn tricks to route and nat the aol-bound packets through my dsl at home. but then the terrorists have won. heh

Yeah, you'll have to re-route all your packets thru another "apparent" source, but it works

OK as a workaround for now, LE -> AOL email is being delivered from/thru my home network instead of directly from the LE servers.... about 80 emails just went through a few mins ago. I found some sort of whitelist service AOL offers, but it seems to be more for opt-in bulk emailers, which we aren't really. so we don't quite fit some of their requirements. Maybe I'll try to sign up anyway.

Ok that worked for about 30 mins. They are now blocking the IP of my home network with the same (apparently misleading/incorrect) RLY:NW message. I guess they didn't like receiving around 90 emails in such a short time period.

Ok, I'll try their whitelist program. If that doesn't work, I give up. I can't send email to a provider who won't accept it.

As a ISP, AOL sucks.... Best course of action is to abandon AOL...

Dale

Unfortunately, 349 of our registered/activated users are using @aol.com or @cs.com email addresses. And I just got a couple of emails this morning from @aol.com users who are having trobule either activating/registering or resetting their password because the emails aren't getting through.

Ok, at the moment, AOL is accepting our mail again without delay. I have not heard anything from them so I have no idea if it has anything to do with my request to be added to their whitelist program thingy.

But check this out: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/03/033202

It sounds like in the future, they want to start charging people to be on their whitelist. I can assure all of you that we will not be paying AOL a dime in order to send email to AOL addresses. :)

...and the blocking has started again.

Hey Everyone, I just spoke to one of my "insider" friends at AOL... He recommends this:
LOGON to your AOL acct (but get rid of it as FAST as you can LOL but until you do GET RID OF AOL), go to http://mail.yahoo.com & sign up for FREE yahoo mail acct. Have all of your LE mail sent there. Everytime you logon to your aol acct, go straight to your free yahoo acct and read your email from LE there.

hehehe that's funny that someone at AOL would suggest that. oddly enough, yahoo mail seems to be the #2 source of email problems for LE users. Their spam filters really like to mis-identify some of our emails as spam, so they wind up either in your Bulk folder or auto-deleted (depending on how you have your yahoo spam filter setup). This seems to be mainly a problem with the initial welcome email we send to new users which contains the activation code needed to activate a new account. I've tried to tweak the wording on that email to make it sound as little like spam as possible, but I still get a lot of new yahoo.com users contacting us who never saw the activation email. It's not like we say "Welcome to LE, where you can get y0ur fr33 c1al1s!!!!!!!!!!1!1!!"

On a positive note, I received a response yesterday from AOL saying that our mail server IP was accepted to the AOL whitelist and that it would take effect within 24 hours. As of right now, all AOL-bound email has been delivered and they haven't been refusing our mail since about 4am MST this morning.

Jason - aol has been blocking email from me for six months, claims I broadcast spammed aol. Like I know how to do that! But then maybe they see mail to five aol addresses at once as spam. Have never been able to resolve it. - martha

I have aol. One time they did that to me. Only I was sending out millions of emails on just one day. I called them...in India, I think, and they changed my password again. They've been really good working with me.

On the other hand, I have some boards of my own, on which I recommend people not sign up with aol accounts. I did it on aol and it worked fine, but some others can't manage, until they switch to other email accounts. Hotmail has had no problems.