AOL Spam Blocking - An Amazing Tale

It is getting harder and harder to run an independent mail server.

For the n'teenth time in the last 2 years, AOL has blocked my local e-mail server for sending spam to an AOL account. We host e-mail for my small company and a number of local, environmental organizations. Usually, AOL automatically removes the block after a day or so. This time, after about 10 days, we realized it was not coming back.

Tue 2005-11-15 10:43:09: <-- 554-: (RLY:CH) http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/554rlych.html
Tue 2005-11-15 10:43:09: <-- 554 TRANSACTION FAILED Tue 2005-11-15

As it turns out, the spam was coming though our server because one of our users had forwarded their local e-mail account to their personal, AOL account. Also, the user was marking the incoming messages as spam when they accessed their AOL account.

Here is the amazing part: I found a contact number for the AOL Postmaster and a live person answered the phone without having to navigate a maze of phone options. Not only that, but the person that answered was polite and extremely helpful! (Ok, it seemed amazing to us at the time).

We are having a similar issue with AT&T Worldnet and are waiting for a response from them. The bottom line is that we no longer allow automatic mail-forwarding from our server.