AOL again
This time last year, I mentioned that a client of mine had been sending spam reports to AOL accusing himself of forwarding spam to his own account. As a result, his hosting company were threatened with blacklisting. Fortunately, I was able to fix that situation by suspending the client’s mail forwarding and forcing him to use webmail instead.
Now, another UK hosting company has exactly the same problem.
- A customer uses a forwarder to send all email sent to their hosted domain to their AOL email account.
- When this customer opens the email at the AOL inbox, he/she finds there is some SPAM in the inbox so use the handy AOL spam reporting tool.
- AOL marks the spam as coming from the hosting company’s network as they forwarded it to the AOL email address. This results in the company’s mailservers being blacklisted rather than the actual originator of the SPAM.
The hosting company in question has subscribed to AOL’s feedback loop and can prove that every email that comes back as “SPAM” has been forwarded from their customer’s email aliases but that appears to cut no ice with AOL and the threat of blacklisting remains.
Net result?
The hosting company has banned the use of AOL email addresses for email alias/forwarding or as a mail ‘default catch-all’. And I doubt they’re the only ones to take this step. So, ultimately AOL’s own customers will be the ones to suffer because of AOL’s poor reporting system.
And people wonder why, on Usenet, “AOL” is synonymous with “clueless”…