Hi all --

We had an internal issue which affected Internet inbound senders today, September 12, 2011. The problem lasted from roughly 10AM (eastern time) until ~3:15PM Eastern time

If you opened a ticket on our Postmasters site because you were having problems sending your Internet mail to AOL members, please retry your mail at this time.

**Note** This did not affect AOL member email out to the Internet, or to other AOL members.

Thank you!

Due to network issues, AOL is currently operating in reputation red mode.

If you are an Internet sender, and your IP's reputation is:

red: your emails will be temp-failed until the outage is resolved;
yellow or undisclosed: depending on server load, some portion of your emails may be temp-failed;
green: you should experience no delays in delivery.

If you are an AOL member:
You will see delays in sending and receiving emails.

I will post when the issue has cleared.

**The issue was resolved around 1:30PM on 5/18, but we will remain in Reputation Red mode until our queues drain. Members should no longer see delays in sending email.**

IP reputation can be queried here: http://postmaster.aol.com/Postmaster.Reputation.php

Thanks for your patience,

Margot.

We rolled out a new version of our back-end on Monday evening and are still working through some kinks. The feedback loop request form is not working correctly at the moment, but should be fixed by COB today.

Thanks for your patience.


*** The FBL intake process was fixed shortly after my post. If you are still experiencing problems submitting a feedback loop request, please comment here. Note: we do basic IP and phone number validation... if you have invalid characters in either form, your requests will fail. ***

mkr.

We have added a few new machines to our outbound mail complex.

ims-d41.mx.aol.com (205.188.249.148)

ims-d42.mx.aol.com (205.188.249.149)

ims-d43.mx.aol.com (205.188.249.150)

ims-d44.mx.aol.com (205.188.249.151)

ims-m41.mx.aol.com (64.12.207.144)

ims-m42.mx.aol.com (64.12.207.145)

ims-m43.mx.aol.com (64.12.207.146)

ims-m44.mx.aol.com (64.12.207.147)

These servers will be handling aberrant mail. So if you would add them to your configurations with appropriate weight, we would be grateful.

Thank you!

Margot.

If you are seeing a DNS:NR error when you attempt to connect to AOL's mx record, we are refusing your connection because the server you are using to send email has no reverse-DNS, or pointer record associated with the IP.

We have been refusing emails from servers with no reverse DNS for years, so this is nothing new. However, the mechanism we were using until recently still allowed a trickle from those servers through.

We recently fixed the glitch, so you may find your emails are now entirely refused, rather than trickling through at a very slow rate.

For those senders who have opened tickets with our Postmaster team and have updated their pointer records accordingly (and who now have reverse-DNS), based on how our lists are aggregated/pushed into production, you may see a 24 - 36 hour delay between when your DNS configurations are updated, and when you are successfully sending emails again to our system.

- Margot.

Our new Phoenix email client allows users who have email accounts on other providers to aggregate email from these numerous sources into one location. You can see Phoenix here.

As such, we've added some new mail hosts which will be connecting to various service providers to both retrieve and send email on behalf of our mutual users.

The IPs which are performing mail aggregation are:

205.188.22.0/26
205.188.22.64/26
205.188.22.128/26
64.12.76.64/26
64.12.76.128/26
64.12.76.192/26

These are carrier grade NATs, essentially acting as POP/SMTP/IMAP servers; please configure as appropriate.

Thanks!

mkr.

AOL is currently operating in reputation RED mode; we have a significant queue of inbound messages we are working through.

Senders whose reputations are RED will experience delays in connecting to AOL's Internet inbound complex.

Internet senders with GREEN and YELLOW reputations may experience delays in delivering mail to AOL members, despite successful connections with our Inbound servers.

I will post an update once our queue has drained. You may check your IP's reputations here:

http://postmaster.aol.com/Postmaster.Reputation.php

***** Update, 11/11/2010, 12:39 PM EST ****

Red reputation mode was lifted yesterday, 11/10/2010 at 16:30 EST, once our inbound mail queue was drained.

***************************************

Thanks for your patience while we continue our mail environment migrations,

Margot.

Hi all --

We're re-doing our Postmaster Queue intake process to help automate as much as possible. If you are an Internet sender (not an AOL member) and you have tried to open a Postmaster Support Request here:

http://postmaster.aol.com/Postmaster.SupportRequest.php

But find your ticket was auto-refused by our system (in other words you weren't able to successfully open a ticket), please post here and we will be in touch.

AOL members who are having problems with their email should continue to use AOL Member Services support, which can be reached from the above link as well. **Note... the Member Services support system is not connected to the changes we are making; AOL members who use Member Services Support will not receive tickets or ticket numbers via the above system.**

Thanks!

Margot

We are currently experiencing a delay in mail delivery both for mail from the Internet to AOL, and mail from AOL to the Internet. The issue started early in the morning and is ongoing; we will repost when service resumes normally.

**Update 8/11/10 1:40PM Eastern** Mail delivery has resumed at regular rates. Some users may experience higher-than-normal spam volumes resulting from this outage.

Thanks for your patience,

mkr.

As part of the migration to the new email architecture, some inactive mailboxes are being canceled. Our sender reputation systems were adjusted prior to this change so that the increase in invalid recipients would not negatively impact mailers.

Please follow your normal procedures for removing accounts that repeatedly return as invalid.

Lachlan

The formatting issues with reports from our new email architecture have been resolved. All FBL e-mails are now being sent

Lachlan

We are experiencing system issues which have caused queueing on our Internet inbound mail system. Organizations whose reputations are RED will have their emails temp-deferred until we have successfully worked off our existing queue.

To check your IP's reputation, please visit this site: http://postmaster.aol.com/cgi-bin/plugh/check_ip.pl

**Normal operating mode resumed on 5/4 at 16:50PM Eastern.**

Internet senders may experience delays delivering email to AOL members. The technical issue which caused the delay has been fixed; we are working the inbound queue off as quickly as possible.

Internet senders whose IP reputations are RED will experience delays in connecting to our inbound MX record until our queue has been drained. Visit this site to check your IP's reputation: http://postmaster.aol.com/cgi-bin/plugh/check_ip.pl

**The queue was fully drained at 7PM EST, 4/27/2010, at which time the reputation restrictions imposed during this outage were removed.**

Hi all -

It's come to our attention that ARF reports submitted by AOL users whom we have migrated over to our new email architecture are severely malformatted. Thank you to those who reported the issue.

As such we have disabled ARF reports temporarily from this user base (composed both of AOL and AIM addresses), until we are able to address the issue. You may notice a decrease in ARF reports/data sent to you via your feedback loop as a result.

I will update this post when we have an ETA on when the formatting issue will be resolved.

mkr.