I email into AOL on a daily basis and have three years experience sending into AOL millions of emails. They are all opt-in and I am on AOL's scomp program. The scomp program is used by AOL to assist legitimate marketing companies to send into AOL without "spam" problems.
AOL has multiple filters that can cause your particular symptoms. The best way to find out what is happening is to read the mailer-daemon failures. The mailer-daemon failure will tell you in plain language what is happening. The partial error you posted is part of the error one gets when one spams into aol. I'm not saying that is what you are doing, but that is part of the error message you get when you do that. The AOL scomp program prevents that error from occurring. Of course to get into the scomp program you have to prove your emails are not spam.
Following that error there should be a special number for your admin to call. That number is not listed and not generally available to AOL general help. So if you call AOL wanting help with the error you posted, they (the general AOL help) will NOT have a clue how to help you. The scomp department/program is pretty secretive and sensitive.
So if you can read the mailer-daemon failures then you should find the solution or reason for the failure. AOL will not generate a mailer-daemon failure for every failed email sent from Outlook. So to get to the actual mailer-daemon failure you will need access to the server var/mail/userid folder. The path to the folder can change depending on the type and set up of your particular server. If you are on a virtual server then you will not (most likely) be able to get to the actual mailer-deamons.
AOL can even control the actual mailer-daemon failures. They can simply not respond with any notification of a failed mail attempt. Generally they will ( in the daemon ) give a failure number like 550 for a mail box not found, but they can just ignore your email. I mean they can just ignore your email. The only way you will know that the emails are not going through is if you don't get your seeds or your recepients don't get their emails.
There are so many variables invloved in sending email into AOL that it would be near impossible to solve your problem without the complete error message.
Here is a basic outline of how AOL filters work.
1. When you send in multiple emails the first filter event counts the number of emails from your domain/ip and the corrisponding subject lines.
2. If you trigger the first filter event, then after reaching X number of emails per subject, your ip/domain is turned off for 24 hours.
3. If you continure to send into AOL after triggering the first filter even, then you trigger the second filter event.
4. The second filter event will then continue to count the number of all emails for your domain/ip regardless of subject. If you continure to send into AOL after triggering the second filter event, then you are done. They will turn your domain/ip off and in the mailer-daemon will notify you that you are spamming and they have turned you off. They will give you the error ( your error is a partial error ) that you posted along with a special number for your admin to call. If you are on a virtual server, then your are done with that domain/ip. Well... unless you can convince your server admin to actually call the spam number.
5. To prevent this type of nonsense from happening AOL has set up a special program for marketers who can prove they are not spamming, i.e. this is not very easy to do. The program is called (as I've mentioned above) the scomp program.
6. You can not get on the scomp program using a virtual server. You must have a dedicated server or semi-dedicated server with at least admin access. Root or su access is better.
7. AOL has a 1500 connectivity limit for all emailers into AOL, even if you are on the scomp system. This slows things down quite a bit.
8. Even if you are on the scomp program, you can not email more that 15 thousand emails per hour into AOL. If you are not on the scomp program, then you will not be able to come even close to this number before you trigger the first and second filter events.
9. AOL tracks the number of mailer-deamons you generate. Yes, they track the daemons. If you generate (even through the scomp program) to many daemons per submissions, they will turn your domain/ip off. If you are on the scomp program, they will notify you before doing so, but they will ask you to re-certify your opt-in basis.
10. Even if you are in the scomp program you have to contend with the slowness of the AOL servers. So it is a general rule of thumb to not have more than 100 emails in the AOL cache at one time. This is just a general rule and has to be spread out over multiple AOL servers. There is a trick to this that I will not devuldge here.
Ok.. so you ask what is the scomp program. It is basically ( I'm not going to give the boat away ) a way for AOL to send to the marketer the removal requests that come into AOL from AOL users. It is by no means this simple, but that is the gist of it.
hth...mike
mike
