BS: Is your aol.com email working|?

Subject: BS: Is your aol.com email working|?
From: greg stephens
Date: 14 Nov 08 - 10:08 AM

I have just discovered that all the emails I send to anyone with an aol.com address are bouncing back. I am sending from a yahoo email. Anybody shed any light on this?

Subject: RE: BS: Is your aol.com email working|?
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 14 Nov 08 - 01:13 PM

I had a brief occurrence a couple of years ago when mail to one clump of addresses from a free hotmail account was being bounced, and it appeared to be due to the recipients' service rejecting anything with multiple recipients as "junk mail" - especially from hotmail. (Even though all the recipients were as BCC so each got only their own copy showing only their own address.)

Current advice is to be very cautious about notices of undelivered mail, especially if you get a "clump" of them as it's a common "phishing" scam. Fake rejection notices are used to "probe" your address, sometimes just to verify the address but often with a "link" or "embedded scripts" to induce you to connect to their malware distribution site. If one of your aol correspondents has been on a "mass mailing" list with a lot of CC addresses, including yours, someone may have the whole mailing list and could be "phishing it."

A quick check shows only three or four aol.com users in our contacts (of about 400 in recent off-line backups of the list), and none are recently active so we wouldn't have seen anything aol-specific.

If the addressees were included in "multiple addressee" mailings, aol may have bounced them as "junk." If this was the case, you might try sending a few of them individually addressed messages for confirmation that this was the case.

In a case of multiple non-deliveries, confirming with at least a few that they actually didn't receive your mail - using a method other than email, perhaps - might be in order if you have a way to do it, to assure that you're not getting phony notices.

I haven't heard of recent "mass migrations" of people leaving aol, although there have been a few in the past; but verifying that the addressees haven't changed email addresses (and services) is an obvious thing to do.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Is your aol.com email working|?
From: greg stephens
Date: 14 Nov 08 - 01:16 PM

I first experience it by sending to a group of friends addresses, and got notification back that it had failed to go to all the aol.com addresses. I then tried writing to one or two individually, but it failed to go to them either.

Subject: RE: BS: Is your aol.com email working|?
From: Skivee
Date: 14 Nov 08 - 01:26 PM

FWIW My AOL mail is working just fine.

Subject: RE: BS: Is your aol.com email working|?
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 14 Nov 08 - 02:05 PM

Free hotmail accounts, at least for a while, had a "ten messages per day" sending limit, after which hotmail blocked me from sending anything for the next 24 hours. (Mine wasn't a "free account" and they did remove the block when I complained.)

Some providers also have made a practice of blocking all mail from a sender if a message (or a few together) are diverted as "bulk mail." A block of this kind commonly is for a fairly short time, and should go away - for individually addressed messages - if it's not re-triggered.

I had one recipient a while back whose service blocked anything from hotmail, unless the sender was in the recipeints online address book. One message would block for ten days, but a second message received before the ten days expired resulted in a permanent block that even the recipient couldn't remove. He got a different service quite quickly. In this case, with a little research, I found the service had a "published policy" that explained this "feature." Since such blocks are usually intended as anti-spam devices, most services won't tell you what they are doing so it can be difficult to resolve one of these "quirks."

My recollection is that the last time I tried to look at aol policies, you had to log in with "your aol address and password" even to look at their FAQ page; but that may have changed as it's been some time ago.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Is your aol.com email working|?
From: Murray MacLeod
Date: 14 Nov 08 - 06:51 PM

it may indeed be the case that AOL are blocking yahoo emails.

all the spam I get (mostly Nigerian scam) is invariably from yahoo addresses , but my spam filter is empty at the moment, most unusual ...