[91448] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: AOL Mail Problem
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Simon Waters)
Fri Jul 28 03:32:55 2006
From: Simon Waters <simonw@zynet.net>
To: nanog@merit.edu
Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2006 08:31:32 +0100
In-Reply-To: <20060727165928.GA11565@mitch.veggiechinese.net>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
On Thursday 27 Jul 2006 17:59, William Yardley wrote:
>
> Keeping in mind that they are not only a huge email provider, but also
> that their user-base is mostly not exactly tech savvy, I think Carl,
> Charles et al do a pretty good job over there.
I think Carl moved on to other things in AOL.
> Dealing with their postmaster team can still take a while sometimes, but
> they'll generally respond.
Experience here is that they don't any more. I've got responses, but not via
postmaster@.
They still do simplistic blocks on content, i.e. containing certain types of
content will cause a message to be rejected outright, without any sort of
consideration of the other content of the message. I think that is a broken
model.
Some sort of port 25 block, but neither a complete block, nor guaranteed
delivery, but some sort of intermediate proxy. This makes life very hard on
people who are learning about email, or coming from elsewhere. I think what
was needed was abuse detection and some sort of walled garden approach, which
could have dealt with all forms of abuse, not just email.
I appreciate changing anything at all on that sort of scale is always
tremendously challenging.
