Among other things, if they can't do a successful reverse lookup on you, they will consider you unauthorized/

Please explain.

I use a dial up ISP, freeserve for my Internet connection. Presumably that would be the IP address they look up? I maintain 2 web sites, jonbanjo.com and folkinfon.org and use the email services provided by my web host. Thier SMTP servers require authentication but if I'm understanding you correctly, AOL could still assume that messages are being sent via "open relay".

Jon (hoping I've missunderstood something)