AOL Postmaster support is back online. Thanks again for your patience. We did not lose any requests as far as we know, so please wait patiently for responses.

-David

Postmaster support is currently offline as we work through a technical issue. Your requests will be processed (eg, you should receive an email that your request was received), but will not be actioned until the system comes back online. Please do not submit multiple requests on the same issue. We will post an entry on the blog when the system is back online.

Thank you for your patience.

-David

AOL will be performing some maintenance on our postmaster support tools on Thursday, June 11, 2009 from 1-3PM. Please expect them to be non-functional during this time period. As a reminder, these tools are found at:
http://postmaster.info.aol.com/waters/index.html

Whitelist and FBL request functionality is expected to be unaffected.

Thank you for your patience.

-David

The FBL and WL request system is back online and should be working properly.

Have a good weekend!

-David

We are currently experiencing technical issues with our feedback loop system. You will be unable to submit WL and FBL requests while we resolve these issues. Thank you for your patience.

-David

For a while now, we have been using the Spamhaus Policy Block List (PBL) for some of our spam-fighting needs. Our preferred method for you to identify your dynamic IP space is via the PBL. Please submit and update your dynamic IPs with Spamhaus as needed. Blocking mail that comes from dynamic IPs can be a very effective spam-fighting technique, but only if we all participate!

To manage your dynamic IPs with regards to the PBL, please visit Spamhaus' website. They provide this particular service free of charge.

(And, no, Spamhaus is not paying us to advertise, but perhaps we should charge them. :))

David
Systems Programmer, AOL Postmaster Team

The AOL Postmaster Team is pleased to announce the beta of our new web support tool for delivery issues. Please feel free to test it out and give us your thoughts and feedback. We hope it will provide a way for mailers to get help and resolution more quickly than ever before!

It must be stressed, though, that this is just a beta, and problems could arise. If you run into problems with the tool and need more immediate help, please call us. That said, we hope everything will go smoothly, and that you will like what we've put together!

David
Systems Programmer, AOL Postmaster Team

Invalid recipients are a fact of life for any mailer. You can minimize them with confirmed/double opt-in, but you still have typos and people who change their email addresses. We get that - it's cool.

At the same time, invalid recipients are used industry-wide as a metric of how good a mailing list is, and high invalid recipient numbers are associated with unsolicited mail and namespace mapping. That's not cool.

We've always factored invalid recipients into a sender's reputation, but we want to give you a heads up that we're refining the process a bit. As such, we would like to remind mailers that high numbers of invalid recipients is a Bad Thing and will result in poor delivery and removal from the whitelist.

Now, I know you, and you are asking, "What's a high number?" That's easy. A high number is a number higher than that which we consider indicative of a good mailer. If your invalid recipient stats are consistent with mailers similar to you, this shouldn't matter much to you. If you generate more invalid recipients than mailers similar to you, you will see a negative impact on your delivery in the near future.

David
Systems Programmer, AOL Postmaster Team