Sending Emails to AOL

[LeonieCol]

I am sick and tired of having our mail rejected by AOL.

I have tried everything I can think of to sort this out. We are NOT blacklisted, we have Reverse DNS and we have a statit IP for the mail server.

Can anyone think of other things that I need to check to be able to send to AOL? I have requested to get onto their whitelist but of course they haven't done anything about it.

[joe90bass]

We're in the same position, with reverse-DNS and I've also requested to be allowed/whitelisted.

Sorry, this post is of no help to you, but it makes me feel a little better knowing we're not alone

[LeonieCol]

It's annoying isn't it!

[SYNACK]

It took us three months to get onto the yahoo whitelist as they had helpfully blacklisted all of NZ by default. Just keep emailing them about it and of course inform those that are trying to send email to the affected addresses that it is because {provider name here} is a useless company and they should move their business else where.

Managed to convert three of our staff away from YahooXtra before they finally sorted it.

[gshaw]

AO-hell being a pain as usual We're still stuck on their blacklist as I can't make calls to the USA to get through to their postmaster department... UK number as if!

Have you tried this?

http://postmaster.aol.com/tools/telnet.html

[LeonieCol]

Thanks but yeah I tried that already. It didn't work, so I reported the error as requested and surprise surprise haven't heard anything.

[gshaw]

What error did it spit back at you?

[Netman]

We worked around this by sending mail via our ISP smarthost instead of direct from our server. If you're running exchange you can add an additional SMTP connector that sends mail for problem domains out via a smarthost...
It was the only way we could make it work in the end - and typically one of the governors has an AOL email addy

[LeonieCol]

First of all it will take a long time to try and connect, and then it will stop with a failure message that it cannot open the conenction to the host.

[webman]

We got blacklisted for spam at one point but I phoned them and they sorted it all out - no problems since.

[Sylv3r]

We have been blacklisted once before but it seems to be working now. It is a bit annoying when you are trying to get in touch with them and they don't sort it!

[john]

AOL at one point blocked all .sch.uk domains so all schools were suffering a bit since they are just stupid with blocking, I agree with it but balancing it all out is gd

[gshaw]

We got blacklisted for spam at one point but I phoned them and they sorted it all out - no problems since.

Was that a UK or US number?

[joe90bass]

What error did it spit back at you?

554- (RTR:CH) http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/554rtrch.html
554 Connecting IP: *.*.*.*


Connection to host lost.

Y:\>
EXPLANATION:
Oh, this wasn't what I got last time I tried, I'm guessing our reverse DNS is now working and we're blacklisted as the above means:

Your IP address has generated AOL member complaints and your mail system may be compromised due to a virus or other security related issue

[Geoff]

That error basically means there's some AOL users being thick and manually classifying messages from your systems as spam. Teacher being overzealous informing parents of school events perhaps?