Mail problems Options

[Serge]

Over last week many of our customers reported problems sending emails to AOL or Yahoo, because these providers rates their mail as SPAM.

First of all I must say that none of our servers is blocked by any Antispam sites like spews.org or spamcop.net as well as openrelays such as ordb.org.

Yahoo and AOL have their own algorithms to rate letters as SPAM and all we can do about it is to ask them to unblock any host or ip. We send them mail daily with zero result.

Current mail problems with these providers happened because of 2 global issues that happened over last week.

1. formmail.pl new hole.
Known script had a new hole opened last week that enabled spammers to send mail by launching it through the web. Thus many sites were affected by this issue. We scanned our servers for these script and automatically deactivated all copies of the formmail.pl.

2. 2 viruses W32.Sobig.f and W32.Yaha.F@mm overhelmed the net last week. Once they infacted computer they started to further distribute themselves over net using contactlist they found on infacted computer.
Our customers were affected in 2 ways.
- some noticed that they sent viruses. In fact it was a virus on the computer of the friend that just took a email from the contact list to put in
From: field and make infacted email to look natural.
- others were infacted themselves and virus actually sent infacted latters over our SMTP server.

In this case the most we could was installing antivirus software on our servers to stop spam and notify customers whose computers were infacted.

Because of these 2 factors some of the customer hosts and our servers were blocked by AOL. I believe that AOL will release blocks soon once they finally go through the huge amount of letters sent by hosts like Hostony. Because problem is global and many ISP on the net were affected.

In the meantime if you cannot send mail to the AOL users you can try to send them through SMTP server of your local ISP hoping that they are not blocked by AOL.

[artrocity]

From slashdot.org

Your Rights Online: AOL Sued For Over-Zealous Blocking

Posted by timothy on Monday August 25, @08:32PM
from the spy-vs.-spy-escalation dept.
mik writes "America Online has been sued by CI Host, a Texas-based hosting company for defamation, interference with contractual rights and unfair competition. CI Host has been awarded a temporary restraining order, though AOL has apparently not complied. This may be the first such in a series of suits leading up to, perhaps, to class-action status relating to AOL's recent zealotry in anti-spam policy resulting in the presumption that shared-hosting providers are guilty (of spamming) unless proven innocent."

http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/l...cal/6597267.htm
http://www.hostreview.com/news/news/030822CIHost.html
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/03/08/25/22532...&tid=187&tid=99

[Serge]

Just got report from the user that server14 is unblocked by AOL.

Don't know what resulted it, but we made many efforts to make AOL to unblock us.

Also we had to stopped sending notifications to the sender of the email in case mailscaner found that email is infacted. Notifications to our users are still sent. It was done because we got a lot of infacted mail from AOl users (about 6-8? a day) and though that sending so many notifications to AOL may lead to qualifying us as bulk mailers by AOL. Don't know whether that was true. Still no official responce from AOL to all our inquires.

[VSDP]

America Online has been sued by CI Host, a Texas-based hosting company for defamation, interference with contractual rights and unfair competition.

CI HOST boast they were stopping 54 830 000 spam mails this week only. :-)))))))

[BigJimW]

I wonder how they made out with their contempt motion they were filing againsed AOL?

Guh, I hate AOL. "America Off-Line". I'll be willing to bet that AOL themselves are responsible for at least 40% of the spam that flows on the web.

[jchrastina]

Looks like server10 is once again blocked by AOL. None of my clients can send email to anyone at AOL.
I realize this problem stems from AOL, but I wish Hostony could do SOMETHING about it.

I hate having to tell my clients to tell their friends that AOL ######S.

[Vanya]

Ok, we'll see what can be done with this.
Maybe there is somebody who can advise how can we make AOL be more equitable?

[swift535]

is this still a problem? I run phpbb on my site and am constantly getting delivery failure notifications when phpbb tries to email users to tell them that they have a new message in their mailbox, etc. It forced me to disable phpbb's registration confirmation (to activate accounts) because users weren't getting their activation emails

[corrob33]

I am a web developer and I have many clients hosted on Hostony. While hostony has many positive things going for it, my two big complaints are backups and email problems. I understand that due to the nature of the spam crisis, companies like AOL are making rash anti-spam policies that treat smaller companies unfairly. However, my clients do not care why their email doesn’t go through they just want it to work and so do I. Due to the extremely high importance that business clients put on email I would hope that finding resolutions to the email problem is one of hostony's highest priorities.

I suggest that hostony makes proactive attempts to get whitelisted by AOL and other big ISP's (if you need the phone number and contact information for AOL's whitelisting department please email me).

I am really hoping to see improvements soon as I hate to think of having to move so many clients. Also, it’s a little embarrassing to suggest that a client get a hotmail address

[corrob33]

HAS ANYTHING BEEN DONE ABOUT THIS IN MONTHS!!!
THERE SEEMS TO BE NOTHING DONE ABOUT EMAIL PROBLEMS.

[NMB]

An update would be great... also aol now blocks email being sent from port 110, and hostony cannot send from any other port... i cannot get my clients on aol to set up hostony email accounts in outlook becuase of this... anyone have a work around? (short of forwarding mail etc..)