Last week we had some issues with AOL rejecting email from our mailserver due to us allowing too many spam messages to be sent from student computers. On Tuesday we were able to get on AOL’s whitelist. Here is what their email says:
- Work has been completed on your Whitelist request and should become effective tomorrow evening by 7:00 PM EDT/EST.
White listing exempts you from most of the spam filters at our mail gateways, however, it is not a guarantee of delivery. As was indicated in the guidelines, AOL requests that mailers keep their complaint rates under 0.1%, bounce rates under 10% and bounce accept rates above 90%. On any give day that any of these thresholds are broken, on the morning of the following day you will be sent an email notification, called a report card, to postmaster, abuse and root at domain name. If you get these regularly, it’s a good idea to examine your process and procedures for list acquisition and management. Not to do so could result in complaints reaching a high enough threshold that you could incur a dynamic block. As the name implies, there is no advance warning with this block. You will know it occurred by the presence of 554 RLY:B1 message returns in your mail logs.
White listing does not affect the routing of email to the users inbox. That is, mail can get delivered to either the “new” mail folder or to the “Spam” folder. This routing is conditioned by Personal Adaptive filters and is unaffected by white listing.
For more information on this request, please visit our website or call the AOL Postmaster Helpdesk at 888-212-5537.
Thank You,
AOL Postmaster.
So hopefully we can keep our end of the deal and stay off their block list.
Also, another thing we noticed. Some accounts here have their email forwarded to an AOL account. Then when spam gets sent to the GAC account, forwarded to the AOL account, and then marked as spam by the user, AOL thinks GAC sent the spam. Too many of those and we end up on the block list again.