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1.  

   Interesting...

   

   JL, Aug 23rd, 2003 @ 1:30pm

   
   

   It does put aol in an interesting position... Does blocking the email from an entire ISP consitute an abuse of their monopoly?

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2.  

   No Subject Given

   

   Anonymous Coward, Aug 23rd, 2003 @ 6:38pm

   
   

   AOL is doing some pretty interesting stuff... My hosting company has 2 sets of unix servers (each runnign different account types). One of those account types is on AOL's block list. This means that no one from any of those sites can send a mail to AOL. Well, they can send them, but they get /dev/nulled. No bounce is returned, etc.
   This is basically the shotgun approch to killing a housefly. There are certainly cases where it is in a domains best interest to block email from a site, but blocking off an entire network because someone spammed from there (*) a long time ago, is just the sort of hyper response that we would expect from a company that is losing customers.
   (*) The ISP in question has a very strong anti-spam policy; the IP addys that they have in those blocks belonged to soemone else as few as 5 months ago, so I suspect that a previous spammer had them, and now the ISP is paying the price thanks to AOL's blocking policy.

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3.  

   Re: No Subject Given

   

   Anonymous Coward, Aug 23rd, 2003 @ 8:40pm

   
   

   Do what I did. I banned AOL and return an error code asking them to call AOL for the fix.

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4.  

   Re: AOL-blocked servers

   

   Doug, Aug 24th, 2003 @ 3:24pm

   
   

   Two items. First, are both servers RFC-compliant? Try running DNS Report on your domain name. The hosting company that I use is very sloppy about setting up the reverse-DNS. The servers that have proper reverse-DNS can send to AOL just fine, but the servers without reverse-DNS are rejected by AOL. AOL provides a list of requirements that they use to distinguish between real mail-servers and spammers. If your mail server looks like a hack-job, AOL isn't going to accept mail from it.

   Second, if the problem is a specific block on the IP addresses based on past spamming by a previous holder, you should be able to request that AOL look into it, and/or you can request to be added to their whitelist.

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5.  

   Re: AOL-blocked servers

   

   Anonymous Coward, Aug 24th, 2003 @ 9:27pm

   
   

   First, are both servers RFC-compliant?
   
   AOL doesn't follow the RFC's. Postmaster is not accepted.

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6.  

   lawsuits

   

   aNonMooseCowherd, Aug 24th, 2003 @ 11:56pm

   
   

   Can one ISP sue another for blocking it?

   Anyone can sue anyone else for anything. Winning is another matter.

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7.  

   Should I have a go too?

   

   A disgruntled hostmaster, Nov 20th, 2003 @ 10:54am

   
   

   Our servers have now been blocked for the second time by them and it cost us a lot of time the first time they blocked us (time is money) to make the necessary changes (necessary to them anyway) to our server to the standard they expected (reverse DNS changes etc). I still haven't had a report from them at all and I have an expensive phone call every time that I need to contact their tech support as they don't have any control over their systems through their UK division.
   
   They're not being very professional about it eh!!!
   
   So do you guy's think I should take this further?

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