A number of senders are reporting that they’re getting unusual responses from AOL servers. The responses include:
421 mtain-dk10.r1000.mx.aol.com Service unavailable – try again later
554 mtain-dk03.r1000.mx.aol.com ESMTP not accepting connections
mtain-dk* are assigned reserved IP addresses. It looks like something broke inside AOL again, and lots of places are having trouble delivering mail there.
There have been ongoing reports this week from ESPs and ISPs that AOL is having problems accepting email. People are reporting difficulties connecting to AOL MTAs and random dropping of connections. Other people are reporting random rejection messages that make no sense. A number of folks are seeing rejections claiming that the reason is a new IP when that IP has successfully sent mail from that IP in the recent past.
AOL seems to be working on things, and some people are seeing improvements. If you’re seeing AOL problems recently, it’s not you. It’s them.
EDIT: AOL has asked senders to please reduce mail volume while they are resolving issues.
Some news stories and links today.
Spamhaus has announced their new domain block list (DBL). The DBL is a list of domains that have been found in spam.
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.