Why is AOL not getting our mails?

Hi,
This whole subject is a big can of worms. Basically, AOL (and many other major isp's) have decided that unless the server that sent the mail has a static (never changing) ip address that is registered with internic (the big daddy for dns)then the mail will be blocked. This means that anyone who dials in to an isp and has an ip address assigned on the fly is unable to send mail to an aol address. They've done this because a lot of the spam mail in the world is sent by spammers using temporary accounts \ addresses to put a mail server on the 'net. AOL's thinking seems to be that if you need your own mail server then you should be using a business account with your isp which would usually mean a static ip and an always on connection.You can try contacting aol directly about this, but I wouldn't hold your breath. Check out

http://postmaster.info.aol.com/whitelist.html

Who cares? Most techs think AOL users are losers, why would you want to send them mail anyway? I have my firewall set to block ANYTHING from AOL.

Ralph

I have actually been addressing this very problem today. Yesterday afternoon I found out that two employees, one being a VIP, had clients with aol accounts not receiving emails from them. Searching our event logs yielded nothing. I did come across this article here on tech republic. "Avoid the Spammer Label" contributed by Tim Landgrave. Other searches yielded a suggestion to contact aol directly via a phone number listed after doing a whois lookup on aol.com. It is NOT a toll free number. And when called it is stated that this number is for network administrators with issues regarding topics such as this.
20 minutes of hold time got me a live breathing person telling that, yes, our ip address is currently being blocked by aol. Iwill say this person was very friendly and helpful. He gave me two email addresses to send a workticket number to and explained that being a first come first served type of call center. My ip may or may not be unblocked within the next 3 to 10 business days.

see this link also: http://www.tek-tips.com/gpviewthread.cfm/qid/536522/pid/10/lev2/3/lev3/15

whois lookup: http://www.registrar.aol.com/whois/whois.adp?name=aol.com

Hope that helps

I'm not sure what you mean by "Dynamic ISP". Do you mean that your ISP's mail server's IP address is dynamic? If so, time to change ISP's.

Be that as it may, AOL recently banned mail from servers with missing PTR (reverse DNS) records.

A DNS lookup for a URL returns an IP address
a reverse DNS for an IP returns a host name

This can a legitimate tool in the arsenal against against spammmers; RFC guidelines specifiy that every host defined in DNS have a reverse DNS (PTR) record. Many domains are mis-configured, and do not provide reverse lookup.