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.
I’m hearing from lots of folks that they’re seeing some improvement in delivery to AOL accounts.
As everyone can imagine, the AOL situation has been a common thread of discussion on many delivery lists. One person even commented at how fragile the AOL mail server seems. My own thoughts are a little different. The AOL mail system is notoriously complex and integrated. Many of the folks who built it have been laid off or otherwise moved on to other companies. I know there are still smart, competent people riding herd on the AOL mail servers, but I expect they don’t have the resources to do the ongoing maintenance and the fire fighting and all the other tasks that a mailserver handling billions of emails needs.
What this means is that the AOL mail system has been suffering from bit rot for at least 2 years. It is to the original designers’ credit that it’s taken this long before there were major problems like we’ve seen over the last week.
I’m still hearing reports that AOL is still having problems accepting mail. I’ve also heard they’re still working on it. There is no information on when a fix may be finished.
Read MoreYesterday 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.