AOL Postmaster Blog

Email System Issues

Margot Romary — 2011-09-12T17:09:00+00:00

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!

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AOL is in Reputation Red and Yellow Modes.

Margot Romary — 2011-05-18T11:24:00+00:00

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.

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Feedback Loop Request Form Broken

Margot Romary — 2011-05-11T11:31:00+00:00

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.

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General Update

Margot Romary — 2011-05-05T16:51:00+00:00

We are in the process of automating email problem report resolution. This is a mid-term project, and is being implemented in stages on a queue-by-queue basis. (Ex: Each unique error code type represents a different queue, as do feedback loop and whitelist requests. http://postmaster.aol.com/Postmaster.Errors.php )

The last couple of months were spent migrating our sundry ticketing systems onto one common platform -- essentially readying a back-end for the front-end logic flow that you will interface with. We are excited to finally be addressing the part of this project that will offer, in most cases, immediate resolution to your issues.

We are starting with router-level queues, the first of which will be RTR:BB errors. I will post on our progress as we push the code into production, along with what ticket submitters should expect with the automated process specific to the queue addressed. If you are seeing problems with the queues in transition, please comment on that particular blog post, and we'll take a look.

Meanwhile, our Postmaster staff will continue handling every ticket we receive.

Thanks for your patience and support during this transition!

Margot.

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New Outbound Servers

Margot Romary — 2011-03-28T15:13:00+00:00

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.

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Do you have a DNS:NR error?

Margot Romary — 2011-03-17T15:12:00+00:00

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.

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New Outbound Mail IPs

Margot Romary — 2011-02-08T16:44:00+00:00

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.

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Internet Inbound Mail Delays

Margot Romary — 2010-11-10T00:46:00+00:00

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.

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Problems Opening Trouble Tickets?

Margot Romary — 2010-08-19T16:59:00+00:00

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

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Email Delays

Margot Romary — 2010-08-11T08:59:00+00:00

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.

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Increase in invalid recipients

Lachlan Maxwell — 2010-05-27T15:40:00+00:00

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

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ARF report issue resolved

Lachlan Maxwell — 2010-05-27T15:36:00+00:00

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

Lachlan

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Red Reputation Restrictions In Place

Margot Romary — 2010-05-04T13:47:00+00:00

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.**

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Internet Inbound Mail Delay

Margot Romary — 2010-04-27T14:39:00+00:00

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.**

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ARF report issue

Margot Romary — 2010-04-15T16:09:00+00:00

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.

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Error code fixed

Annalivia Ford — 2010-02-23T18:02:00+00:00

We should not be returning "451 4.3.0 : Temporary lookup failure" for invalid users as of 2/18. If people are still seeing this error code issued after that date, please let us know.

--
Annalivia Ford
Senior Technical Account Manager
AOL Postmaster Team

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Error code update

Annalivia Ford — 2010-02-08T14:17:00+00:00

We are at present issuing a "451 4.3.0 : Temporary lookup failure" which should be read as "User not known". This is transient and we will post an update when it stops.

This is not replacing the existing two codes:

500, text= 5.1.1 : Recipient address rejected: aol.com

and

550 Mailbox not found

Senders using scripts to remove unknown users automatically should be looking for all three codes for the moment.

--
Annalivia Ford
Senior Technical Account Manager
AOL AntiSpam

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ARF fix pushed successfully

Annalivia Ford — 2010-02-02T11:15:00+00:00

The additional text included in some of the feedback loops was corrected as of Friday. Thank you for letting us know about it.

--
Annalivia Ford
Senior Technical Account Manager
AOL Postmaster Team

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System Status Update

Annalivia Ford — 2010-01-28T15:56:00+00:00

There have been reports of our ARF feedback loops having some extra text in them that is causing parsing problems for some people. We are aware of the issue and will be rolling a fix by the end of the business week.

The MTA migration continues. Please check back here for updates. We will post them as we get them.

--
Annalivia Ford
Sr. Technical Account Manager
AOL AntiSpam Operations

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Postmaster Team Update

Annalivia Ford — 2010-01-14T11:25:00+00:00

The Postmaster team has suffered significant staff reductions, and any tickets opened will see slower processing times. Thank you for your understanding and patience.

-Annalivia Ford
Senior Technical Account Manager
AOL Postmaster Team

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