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

Edited June 5, 2008 by joe90bass
To remove my IP address!!

[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?

[joe90bass]

They're not open yet, just tried ringing. I wonder if they block on maestegcs.bridgend.sch.uk or just bridgend.sch.uk, if it's the latter then we could be blacklisted because of another school in our area

 

I subscribed to the feedback loop over a year ago and I've had no notifications

[gshaw]

I'm in exactly the same boat as you, hence why I thought that Telnet test would show up the problem - apparently just takes one AO-hell user clicking spam and you get blacklisted

 

Did you call the USA number and they still weren't there

[joe90bass]

I've just spoken to their postmaster dept on- 00 1.888.212.5537 (US Number) he's removed us from the blacklist and we'll be able to send to AOL addresses in the next 24-48 hours. The call took about 2 mins in total, so even though it's a USA call it shouldn't cost too much!

[LeonieCol]

I just tried to call them and got put on hold and transferred from department to deparment about four times! The person I eventually spoke to told me she had never heard of such a problem! The cheek! I pointed out that there is an entire webpage devoted to them blocking certain domains so she must have heard of it!

 

She then said she would not do anything about it because we are not an AOL customer. I spoke in idiot terms so that she would understand that my problem was that I COULD NOT SEND TO AOL, but again, she just said that she couldn't help as she had never heard of this problem.

[joe90bass]

As of today we can now send to AOL.

 

If it helps you........

I rang 00 1.888.212.5537, I straight away said I was calling from Maesteg Comprehensive in the UK, that we've been blacklisted and I'd like to get it resolved! The guy asked what bounce backs I was getting, I said nothing it was sitting in out mail queue, that I'd tried the manual telnet and got 554rtrch error. He then asked my name, what IP address I was sending from and said it would all be okay with 24-48 hours, which it was.

 

Maybe try calling again and hope you get someone else!

 

Oh, I did get the "thank you for calling AOL and have a nice day" to finish, how nice