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.
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AOL layoffs and postmaster changes
As most of you probably know, AOL went through a serious round of layoffs yesterday. Unlike previous layoffs this one did hit the postmaster team pretty hard. Anna posted this morning that she was the only non-programming member of the postmaster team left in the US. This means there are a number of experienced folks looking for work with experience managing delivery for a large outfit. More info is on her blog.
While I don’t have any firm data, I expect that this is going to significantly affect the support that senders see from AOL. I know many of us have held up AOL as the poster child for how ISPs should interact with senders. That era is drawing to a close.
These layoffs come as AOL has migrated to a new mail system and a lot of senders are seeing new and different error messages. I do believe the folks handling the mail system and the migration are still there and are feverishly working to resolve problems caused by the migration. Right now things are in flux and senders should probably expect delays in getting support from AOL for delivery problems.
UPDATE: Matt Vernhout has a list of suggestions for how to deal with AOL delivery issues.
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.
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.