ICG Link News

11.21.05

Problems Sending Mail to AOL users.

We are on AOL's "enhanced whitelist" service. This means AOL recognizes our IP's as benign in their fight against spam... sort of. AOL will still occasionally block all mail from our servers because their automated systems think we are a spammer. How does that happen? Two reasons: When a spammer sends mail to an address here and the client has a forward set to forward mail to an AOL account, the AOL mail servers believe the spam is coming from us rather than from the spammer, so they block us for a while. After a bit, they unblock us, but this has been an ongoing problem and will always be with AOL. We have spoken to them about it and they have no interest in resolving it. Secondly, when an AOL user thinks a message is spam, even if it isn't, they can mark it as such and cause the same thing to happen. We have had AOL users mark such legitimate mail as their own e-commerce sales receipts as spam, so there's absolutely no control over this type of error.

We have said this before, but it bears repeating. AOL is not a business class service and should never be used for business purposes. We recommend that you discontinue use of AOL accounts for business. While AOL's mail blocking stops without any input from us, when a big spammer sends out a particularly large blast, you can expect it to happen again.