AOL, Spam and Your Domain
We’ve recently been notified by a few of our hosting clients that they are having difficulty sending email to AOL accounts. The mail doesn’t make it to the recipient in a timely fashion or never arrives.
We have spent countless hours doing research to track the problem. We have been occasionally blacklisted on the AOL servers. It turns out that we aren’t the only hosting provider with this problem. It is a known issue, currently without a good solution.
As you know, our hosting contracts provide free email accounts. These accounts include direct accounts such as name@domain.com and alias accounts like sales@domain.com. This allows clients to publish a more professional email address using their domain on their website and other marketing material.
Some of our clients would prefer not to build these email accounts in their mail program (Outlook, etc) and have asked us to forward their email to another account. These accounts are often personal accounts such as name@hotmail.com, name@comcast.com or name@AOL.com.
The problem lies with forwards to AOL accounts. This is what happens:
• Mail arrives at our mail server for name@domain.com. The server knows that it needs to forward (basically resend) the mail on to name@aol.com. It forwards the mail.
• The client receives the mail in their name@aol.com account. The client opens the email and sees that it is SPAM. They use their mail program to mark the message as SPAM, which in turn notifies AOL servers.
• The AOL server receives notification that email from name@domain.com is SPAM! It doesn’t understand that the email was forwarded and has no idea who sent the message originally.
• The client is essentially blacklisting themselves from the AOL servers. However, it doesn’t just affect that client because blacklists are based on IP addresses, not domain names. The client is blacklisting the entire IP address, which includes many other domains.
This article was written by Wild Web Works Inc. All rights reserved.
• Another client on the same IP address tries to send email to an AOL account holder and it doesn’t arrive because AOL thinks it’s SPAM.
It is estimated that a minimum of 93% of all email is SPAM and no one has a system that can prevent that type of onslaught. Although we have aggressive SPAM filters on our mail servers, some of it will get through and get forwarded.
In order to stop the possibility of getting blacklisted, effective January 23, 2007 we will no longer forward mail to AOL accounts. Those with AOL forwards have two options: You may change your website addresses to the AOL account to receive mail directly OR you may build your domain email accounts in your mail program.
Our research indicates that hosting providers have had problems forwarding to Comcast and others. We may find it necessary to stop forwards to those accounts in the future.
An easy way to provide a professional interface between you and your customers is to use your company domain email addresses. It adds credibility to your company and is a free way to market your company name to everyone you communicate with.
This article was written by Wild Web Works Inc. All rights reserved.