Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Why Email to AOLand Mac.COM (Same thing) Bounces - Finally Understood The Reason.

Lukily I have no friends that use AOL Email, so this has never been an issue for me, but my wife has a few friends, and more often than not our email bounces.

Today I got an email from our ISP explaining what is going on, and it finally made it very clear to me the source of the problem.

The source of the problem are occuring in two steps.

(1) Someone in the same email system on my ISP sets up a permanent forward from their own account to their own AOL account.

(2) The forwarded email contains some SPAMS.

(3) The user marks the SPAM on the AOL side. This causes the users' ISP as the spammer.

(4) This shuts down the ALL of the users on the ISP that is using the same SMTP server.

My ISP said that AOL is not going to fix this issue, and cannot ask users from stop forwarding to AOL voluntarily so they said they won't forward anything to AOL.

Now it makes sense.


Unknown said...

Now that Google Apps support domain hosting of emails for free, I have started to move my ASP hosted email domains to Google Apps. It works much better with POP, IMAP, and with Gmail interface and spam filtering is significantly good.

Unknown said...

Also, Mac.COM looks like it is "AOL" under the hood. The same bounce issue happened before and once moved to Google apps, the issue has stopped.