Per Boing Boing: the AOL postmaster page was hacked over the weekend.
As of now the site is restored. But I’m hearing that all the scripts are still down. This means no one can open tickets, sign up for FBLs, apply for whitelisting or check the status of reports. I expect this will be fixed soon, but for now it looks like AOL issues are going to be impossible to resolve.
AOL has their new postmaster blog up and running at http://postmaster-blog.aol.com/. Today they announced new tools over there including a FBL checking tool and a block checking tool.
Read MoreSometime last night, AOL managed to delete their MX records, causing mail to hard bounce for at least 3 hours, possibly more. Annalivia noticed, contacted the NOC, appropriate people were paged and the records are now functional again.
This morning AOL seems to be having more mail problems, possibly related to everyone retrying mail that was hard bounced last night after the MX record was deleted. Or the company is just finally showing the consequences of laying off so many people last year.
I think the most worrying bit about this is that the AOL NOC didn’t notice there was no mail coming in for 3 hours. I don’t get mail for an hour and I start checking to see if the mailserver has fallen over. I can’t believe no one noticed no incoming mail for 3 hours.
I suggest that anyone who had AOL bounces last night package those up and resend today. But don’t send them all at once, trickle them out over the course of the day. Remember, everyone else is trying to send their mail, too. And AOL is not having a happy day.
UPDATE: The Return Path Received blog points out some of the reasons some of you might still be seeing AOL mail fail. The fix is to flush your DNS cache or reboot your DNS server.
Yesterday Goodmail sent out mail to all their customers announcing they are ceasing operations and taking all their token generators offline as of 5pm pacific on February 8th.
While this is a bit of a surprise on one level, I’m not that shocked. Ken Magill mentioned in August that Goodmail was on the sales block and rumors have been circulating for weeks about significant changes coming to Goodmail.
Goodmail has struggled to find a market since they first started. At one point they were even giving services away to customers at partner ESPs. Despite the free service, people at some of those ESPs told me they were having difficulty getting customers to adopt Goodmail.
Likewise, on the ISP side, Goodmail didn’t seem to have much penetration into the market. They had AOL, Yahoo and some cable companies, but not much else. And as of early last year, Yahoo removed the Goodmail machines.
I think the real underlying problem was that most companies who are doing things well don’t need certification services. Sure, there are a couple exceptions but in general anyone who is sending good mail is getting to the inbox. Even for companies where delivery was not quite as good as they might want, the marginal improvement at those ISPs that do use Goodmail was not sufficient to justify the cost of Goodmail services.
While I have the utmost respect for the Goodmail management team I think this result was almost inevitable. I never got the impression they valued the end recipient quite as much as the ISPs do. That was just one thing that lead me to believe they just didn’t seem to understand the email ecosystem quite the way that a certification service should.
I echo Dennis’ thoughts and well wishes towards the Goodmail folks. The experiment in sender financed delivery was well worth doing and I think they did it as well as anyone could have.