AOL Users Receiving Emails

[SusanE]

I have noticed that none of the emails being sent from my VBulletin reach AOL users.This includes activation emails, but also the emails that users sometimes want to receive when they mark a forum to email them when new messages are posted. Any ideads?

Thanks much.

Susan

[SaN-DeeP]

What bounce back message you are receiving from AOL ?
This should be due to policy changes at AOL, adoption of new accreditation and Anti-Phishing services, not only you everyone should be affected by this.

this is a kind of pay-to-send-email-to-AOL system

[SusanE]

I do think most vb's are affected by this based on my reading about activation emails here.

I don't get any kind of failure notice, the emails just go off in to the abyss and are never received!

Thanks for your attention to this question!

Susan

[steven s]

Same here.
I use the hack

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=99579

And in the waiting for confirmation message that is displayed I ask AOL and Netscape users to use the contact us link so I can confirm their email address. It is a royal PITA. In my case it might have something to do with my nameserver but it has everything to do with AOHell.

[SusanE]

Bummer. I can get around the activation email problem by using the contact us link, but the ones who choose to be notified when there are new posts (subscribe) to a thread, I can't really handle.

So this problem is on the AOL side then? I think I will contact them.

Thanks much for all your replies!

Susan

[Christie]

Same problem here, one of our moderators is with AOL and not getting forum emails, she has contacted them by email but no response so far.

I'm on BT and had a similar problem recently not getting any emails from our forums. Messaged them about it and they put their own response into my spam box - what hope is there . Did get it sorted with BT though and am now getting my mail.

[Scott MacVicar]

I get vBulletin mail blocked too, the spam filters appear over eager to mark something and people dont usually read their held folder to check for false positives.

[SusanE]

Possible Solution

I don't know how helpful or possible this is, but I spent some time chatting with the AOL postmaster and learned that the problem is most likely that the IP addy for our board does not have a RDNS specified.

You can check the IP for your board by going here:

www.dnsstuff.com

It will also help with failure notices for other mail services, such as comcast.

I have emailed our programmer to find out if it is possible to specify a reverse DNS for our IP to relieve this problem. I don't have an answer yet you techies probably know if this is simple or completely impossible.

Best regards,

Susan

[martyn_16v]

Our DNS settings are fine, but still all of our emails to AOL users get bounced back with a 554rlych error. I've asked AOL to set up a 'feedback loop' for us so we can examine if we are actually currently being clicked as spam.

I have had a look at their whitelist policy to see if we could apply for that, but those bits of it I did understand seemed way over the top.

[Christie]

Have been having a problem today trying to send an email to a recipient who's on AOL. Am sending via my private email address with a link to our forum. AOL keep bouncing it back to me with the reason:

EXPLANATION:
Your e-mail contains a redirecting URL which AOL's servers will not accept.
SOLUTION:
Please remove all redirecting URLs from your mail and try your message again.

I wonder if this could be why activation emails are not delivered because they contain a link?

[Steve Machol]

I'm not sure what the 'redirecting URL' means. Can yyou find any info about this from the AOL site?

[Christie]

I'm not sure what the 'redirecting URL' means. Can yyou find any info about this from the AOL site?

All I can see about 'redirecting urls' is what I've already quoted from the error message on AOL's site. Would try contacting AOL support but the link isn't working.

In the email I sent there was a link to our forum url plus a link to a thread, there was also a picture embeded in the email.

I removed all the links and tried sending it again, but it bounced with the same error message.

When I removed the embedded picture and tried sending again it went through.