AOL not delivering messages

[Newposter]

I am the webmaster for a site for a condo association, and have had email forwarding set up successfully for over a year and a half on my server. The group address forwards messages to each of the 5 trustees at their personal email addresses. Three of these are AOL addresses, and two are other major providers. Whenever an email is sent to the group address, it immmediately forwards to the two non-AOL, but is delayed, and finally fails to deliver, to the AOL addresses. If I send directly to all 5, they all go through immediately. This problem started March 31st and continues. I tried deleting the group account, rebooting, re-creating the account, rebooting, and testing again to no avail. The addresses as entered are all correct.

Is AOL doing something that blocks forwarding? It should be transparent to them. I've tested my server at ordb.org and it's not an open relay. The fact that the other accounts do work suggests that something is different at AOL's end. I had changed nothing on my system and all other features work normally. Any ideas?

Newposter
"Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment."

 

[manarth]

AOL normally compares the "from: " domain with the sending SMTP server's domain; if the two do not match, the message is often identified as junk mail.

e.g.

        from:   dave@davesco.com
 smtp server:   smtp.newposter.com

AOL do this because it appears as if the sender has "spoofed" his email address - a first class symptom of a spammer.

in which case the solution is to change the "from" address when you forward anything so it matches your domain.

e.g.

        from:   thisgroup@newposter.com
 smtp server:   smtp.newposter.com

btw, this is the most likely situation, but there are others as well - will try and find the link to the rest of the info.


<marc>[ul]help us help![li]please give us feedback on what works / doesn't[/li][li]not sure where to start? click here: faq581-3339[/li][/sup][/ul][/sup]

 

[Newposter]

This is very unlikely to be the case, unless something just changed. This has been working fine for 1 1/2 years.

Newposter
&quot;Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.&quot;

 

[manarth]

in that case, perhaps the question to ask is &quot;what has changed?&quot;

here's the link I mentioned:

http://members.aol.com/adamkb/aol/mailfaq/dropped-mail.html

hope it helps.

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[Newposter]

One of my gurus at work thinks the problem is that AOL may have just initiated a check of sender vs SMTP server. In that case, perhaps I can create an account in the same domain as my server name, forward the trustee account to it, and from it to the AOL accounts. Then the sender domain should match the SMTP domain. If that doesn't work, then I must believe that they're tearing into the header and finding that my ISP's domain is different from my SMTP domain. Then I'm screwed. AOL doesn't allow Outlook Express to work - my customers tried that, and get disconnected when they try to fetch email from Outlook.

Newposter
&quot;Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.&quot;

 

[manarth]

MAIL FILTERING
The mai1l is filtered by AOL's servers, not the client - so even if your customers COULD use outlook (and by the way, they can to a certain extent) it still won't produce the email.


USING OUTLOOK
AOL's incoming email server is IMAP - &quot;imap.mail.aol.com&quot; and the outgoing is SMTP &quot;smtp.aol.com&quot; BUT (and it's a big but) AOL use proprietary versions of the IMAP / SMTP protocols, so outlook sometimes glitches...don't know the fix, other than try, try try again until it works!

If your customer wants an email client that behaves similarly to outlook, AOL are releasing AOL Communicator: an &quot;almost outlook&quot; email client.

AOL Members can download it from AOL Keyword &quot;AC Beta&quot; - there is an FTP site somewhere with the d/l but I can't find it this minute.

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[manarth]

ftp download site for AOL Communicator:

http://ftp.newaol.com/jxz/200302ac/ac_install.exe

should do the trick

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[Newposter]

A friend with an AOL account and AT&T account tried forwarding with the same results as me. So it is the anti-spam filtering. Will have to get creative. I may take out two more AT&T email addresses and have the server forward to them, then they can use AT&T's webmail.

Thanks for the link, but these people are not computer literate and do not want to install any other software. I have to think of the least disruptive solution from their point of view.

Newposter
&quot;Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.&quot;