AOL Forwards Turned Off

[Jim]

Forwarding to AOL has been turned off server wide. Basicly the address @aol.com was changed to @SORRY_NO_AOL_FORWARDING_AVAILABLE in the config file which handles aliases. This looks like it affected about 200 domains accross all servers.

Anyone who needs the function to forward email to AOL will need to log in to cpanel and change it back.

Many big companies are forbiding the forwarding of email to AOL because once the mail arrives there, the user who had it forwarded marks it as spam and gets their entire server blocked by AOL. A quick search at google will show this to be the case.

We are not big, so are just disabling it, forcing users who need it and understand that they shouldn't mark mail coming from their server as spam, even if it IS spam.

This is a half measure to preventing it altogether, which we will have to do next if it remains to be a problem. But cannot call AOL every other day to get mail servers unblocked, because eventually they will assume we ARE spammers and refuse to unblock the servers.

The problem arrises due to a half decade long problem with the way AOL handles mail that their users mark as spam. AOL doesn't look for the server of origin to determine the actual server that sent the spam, they just look at the last server the spam touched. That last server is your server, just before you forwarded it to your AOL account.

[Jim]

The forwards being turned off to AOL has worked out pretty well. But we are now having problems with people's contact forms being filled out by spammers.

cc and bcc exploiting isn't possible and hasn't been for years on our servers, as mod_security will catch that and return a 403 error on submission but what is happening is, the spammer fills out a contact form, it gets sent to the person who runs the site to their own AOL address, and they turn it in as spam. Effectively turning in their own site as a spammer, and getting the whole server blocked at the same time.

As we catch this we send out a warning to the owner of the site (or reseller) that the next time the site will be deleted without warning. And the second time, they ARE deleted without warning. Sorry but that's the way it has to be done.

If any of what is written above is not clearly understood contact us. The basic gist is, if you have an AOL email address, don't turn in any email from your domain as spam, because it causes major problems. All mail to AOL is blocked for a minimum of two days. Usually more. I doubt that that idiotic 'this is spam' button at AOL even slows down actual spammers.

I'm writing this because it just happened. Someone turned in 287 comment spam notifications from their own site and got a server blocked.