A reader has been talking with AOL about the mtain* responses that people were receiving. AOL has said both responses mentioning mtain-*.r1000.mx.aol.com are actually DNY:T1 bounces that are being presented incorrectly. Both responses should be treated the same as 421 DYN:T1.
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.
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.
A number of senders are reporting that they’re getting unusual responses from AOL servers. The responses include:
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