AOL improving

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.

Related Posts

AOL: Still broken

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 More

Suing spammers

I’m off to MAAWG next week and seem to have had barely enough time to breathe lately, much less blog. I have a half written post, but it’s taking a little more research to put together. That can wait until I get the chance to do the research.
Instead I thought I’d talk about the North Coast Journal article “The Rise and Fall of a Spam Crusader.” It’s quite an interesting article and looks into the personal and business sacrifices that people make in order to chase down spammers.
In my experience a lot of the serial litigators have very poor practices around data collection and analysis. They don’t collect evidence, they just collect email and then make assertions and assumptions. This not every effective when having to convince a judge that you are right.
The article actually does nothing to change this impression. The cases ASIS won are the cases where the defendants didn’t respond. That also means that ASIS couldn’t collect.
I do disagree with Mr. Singleton, the lawyer, where he says CAN SPAM is dead. In many cases I’ve seen there aren’t clear CAN SPAM violations. So if he’s trying to sue these spammers under CAN SPAM his cause of action is wrong. Secondly, the article goes on to talk about the broader implications.

Read More

AOL goes kablooey

Sometime 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.

Read More