emails to AOL are being bounced back!

i'm about to submit a support ticket but i was wondering if anyone else is having this problem. i just had a client call me (who has an email account on a dreamhost hosted domain) to tell me that her emails to AOL addresses are being bounced back to her. while i was on the phone with her i noticed that an email that i had sent to someone with an AOL address was bounced back to me..... seems like AOL is either blocking all emails generated from the dreamhost mail server our sites are on (kungfu.dreamhost.com) or are blocking all mail coming from dreamhost.

this is the message in the bounced email:

This is the Postfix program at host kungfu.dreamhost.com.

I've already submitted a ticket on this issue. DreamHost are trying to get on to AOL's white list, apparently.

I bet AOL will try to blackmail Dreamhost into singing up for the "premium" services to guarantee delivery of the emails.

This is why I hate AOL's new "anti-spam" methods. It's blackmail if they so wish too.

And I hope DH does NOT pay any fees for e-mail delivery. The more people pay the fee, the more the practice will be set in stone- considered acceptable. Ridiculous. Might be best just to warn recipients on AOL, Hotmail, etc. that they might not get certain messages on those "services." It's ultimately their choice where they receive e-mail.

~Chell

In reply to:
Might be best just to warn recipients on AOL, Hotmail, etc. that they might not get certain messages on those "services." It's ultimately their choice where they receive e-mail.

qfe. I'm all for making a business profitable, but AOL, Hotmail... ignored spam for so long that we know they don't really care about how it effects people. They are now just using it as another exploit to bring in the cash. They really are exploiting this issue to be profitable. They are the ambulance chasers of the internet.

Wow, AOL is a greedy giant...

I used to work for a credit-counseling company that got black-listed for sending automatic quarterly newsletters to its clients. Don't think they ever got it worked out...

http://www.DrinkDrankDrunk.org

In reply to:
I bet AOL will try to blackmail Dreamhost into singing up for the "premium" services to guarantee delivery of the emails.

AOL actually ask for cash to guarantee the delivery of emails to their customers? I would have thought that what ever fees the customers are paying would have covered any costs incurred.

It sounds like a blatant grab for cash to me.

Mark

It's unlikely that DH would consider paying a fee for purely financial reasons. How would it recover that cost?

But even if it was willing to pay, the way the program works would make it difficult for DH to participate. As I understand it, a company cannot simply pay to bypass AOL's spam filters. It has to also become certified as a legitimate email sender and agree to certain email practices. For DH to participate, it would have to get it's customers certified and I don't see DH wanting to take on the headache of doing that.

Is it possible that a working SPF would help here?

-Scott

In reply to:
AOL actually ask for cash to guarantee the delivery of emails to their customers? I would have thought that what ever fees the customers are paying would have covered any costs incurred.

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/03/033202 ;)

Allegations they are censoring "Email tax" opponents: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/14/1354220
Don't know how much is true. Doubtful, however, if it's true, they are not the first ISP to do this -- Another ISP (forget who exactly) was found guilty of it once before.

chell has the best advice. Your best bet is to inform uses of Hotmail and AOL that due to issues with their email services, they may not receive emails. Or you can just deny any AOL or Hotmail address due to "issues with their system."

Probably not. A passing SPF check is not a good indicator of a legitimate message; it turns out a lot of spammers have valid SPF records. A failing SPF check, however, can be an indicator of spam. (As well as an indicator of a dumb spammer, of which there are many.)

SPF is more useful in limiting the damage caused by a spammer using your domain as the return address in a spam campaign.

In reply to:
SPF is more useful in limiting the damage caused by a spammer using your domain as the return address in a spam campaign.

Good Point! Just one of many reasons I would like to see Dreamhost get SPF properly implemented.
--rlparker

It looks like his mail was bounced because a rate limit was exceeded.

I believe the "Buy your way into the inbox" scam they're running is just to avoid the junk folder--not bounces.

Hosts should never pay that, but I'd love to see the large spammers buy their way into AOL inboxes. The only ones that deserve to suffer from AOL's decisions are the users that aren't smart enough to switch to a better ISP.

yeah but what rate limit? not mine, it was one of maybe 6 total emails i have sent to AOL addresses in the last week. this is a larger issue. AOL has put a limit on all mail coming from dreamhost.... this is from support:

"It would seem that DreamHost customers are generating too high a volume of email to AOL customers. AOL throttles us after a certain point. It's possible that this is due to spam-related issues, and we're investigating
this."

now, can someone PLEASE explain to me the point of having dreamhoststatus.com? so far they have completely ignored this issue.... and it's a BIG issue.

In reply to:
yeah but what rate limit? not mine, it was one of maybe 6 total emails i have sent to AOL addresses in the last week.

It says from the IP, so that could be any number of people.

dreamhoststatus.com is for system wide outages. this is happening on just one particular mail server at this time. Although, it isn't happening on one of the mail servers I am on at this time, but it has before.

I agree it is a high priority.

I have always felt that dreamhost should ban users from forwarding emails to aol accounts. I have a client who *used* to have me forward thier emails from some forms we have online to them. They were using the "this is scam mail" button due to all of the mail they get that is not from the forms and dreamhost contacted me about what they were doing. I asked my customers to start using thier *real domain emails* but they wanted to just keep using aol. So, I have all of the forms going to one email on my machine and check it every morning, and just send them the real ones. Which is a royal pain.

It isn't so much dreamhosts fault as it is AOLs. If the email forwarding process could have some sort of way to show the originator's email, along with the forwarding emailers (dh) info, it might make it easier...but that would just make AOL have to do more work...and I doubt they want to do any work at all.

just ranting...sorry...but as for the dreamhoststatus.com, it is only when the entire group of email servers busts...or the whole datacenter goes down...or a ddos is hitting...etc.

any estimate on when this problem will be fixed?

i'm still waiting for it to be fixed.... an easy fix would be to use another IP for this particular email server....

i hope it's fixed soon.

unfortunatly that's not an easy fix for dreamhost. They can't just click the settings on the modem to rester for a new IP address. It address is assinged and part of a logical order and such, it's a lot of work to get a box a new IP.

--Matttail
art.googlies.net - personal website

that, and it's likely a blocklist - meaning a blacklist for an IP block. So DH would have to go and purchase a new IP block to have IPs that aren't rejected.

Changing an IP is also only a temporary solution. We are adding additional servers to spread this email load over as well as continuing to reduce the amount of spam originating on our servers.

There is also a problem with how AOL determines the source of a spam. Their method is not especially accurate and often treats our servers as the spam source when all we did was relay the mail through. We have a lot of users who forward their mail through our servers so they can use their domain as their email address while still using somewhere else to host the email.

- Dallas
- DreamHost Head Honcho/Founder

I'm one of those people who support the idea of paying more to be on a server with less users. Perhaps part of that school of thought would include mail servers which only allow email to be sent/received through them and not forwarded. Those being on their on IP block and thus less likely to get the blockage issues.

If a "premium" option was offered for $10-15/mo as an upgrade to existing plans to get the above, I would go for it. Just a thought.

I'm with snokarver on this one. Though I wouldn't want to be sharing the webserver. I figure we're all pretty heavy users :P

I'd love the idea of premium mail servers. Maybe even premium junk filter servers too. e.g. extra scan time on attachments, stricter blacklisting.

wootindustries.com
Promo Code: WJD97 - $97.00 off any new DreamHost plan (except month-month payments).

emails to AOL are being bounced back!