North American Network Operators Group

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Fun new policy at AOL

  • From: Susan Zeigler
  • Date: Thu Aug 28 03:37:31 2003

Sometime mid last week, one of my clients--a state chapter of a national
association--became unable to send to all of their AOL members. Assuming
it was simply that AOLs servers were inundated with infected emails, I
gave it some time. The errors were simply "delay" and "not delivered in
time specified" errors.

Well, it was still going on today. So, I went on site and upped the
logging on the server. What to my surprise did appear but a nice little
message informing us that "I'm sorry, your IP is dynamically assigned
and aol doesn't accept dynamic IPs. 

WTF. This IP is NOT dynamic. The client has had it for about two years.

I just looked on their website to file a complaint and ask how they
determined what was dynamic and what was static and couldn't find a
contact email address. I did find the following statement:
"AOL's mail servers will not accept connections from systems that use
dynamically assigned IP addresses."

It was on the following page:
http://postmaster.info.aol.com/standards.html

So, since I know someone from AOL does lurk on this list, what's my
recourse. Feel free to email me offlist. Thanks. 

On a side note, my client is also curious who's going to help pay the
bill that they shouldn't have needed to pay me due to AOL changing
policy and blocking them needlessly. Unless AOL is downloading the
entire routing pools from all ISPs on a daily basis, how do they know
which IPs are dynamic and which are static;) And, since static IPs can
actually be assigned out of a DHCP pool as well, even that won't work.

-- 

-- 

--
-Susan
--
Susan Zeigler             |      Technical Services
[email protected]   |      Spindustry Systems
515.225.0920              |      

"You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong." 
-- Abraham Lincoln


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