[SC-Help] Re: AOL Issue

[Chris Wright]

Sorry Mike, I didn't explain it too well I guess.

I'm an experienced SPAMCOP user/reporter, but I guess not that good at 
getting my message across on here :(

I have many domains, email accounts etc etc.

When I receive SPAM on any of them, it gets filtered out and held in a 
temp folder.
I then report the SPAM via SPAMCOP as you would normally.  (I use my 
abuse @ email box on yaps4u.net.

I never or never have reported email coming from ANY of my domains.

I also maintain a few honeypots which every now and then when I see a 
new SPAM attack, I'll submit those to SPAMCOP.  (Perhaps my use of the 
word 'forward' rather than 'report' confused you.

No problems at all with that part what so ever.

Now a few months ago, I had emailed someone at AOL via my yaps4u.net 
domain.  Just a normal email address, not an abuse address, but a 
personal email account.

I was surprised to see that I got a return message from AOL saying that 
they would not accept ANY email from the mail server at YAPS4U.net as 
this email server was responsible for reporting SPAM to them.

Someone else mentioned this problem in another thread (see Re: [SC-Help] 
Re: Spam as pictures) and that was the first I have heard of someone 
else mentioning it.  I had previously searched the web to see if anyone 
else had had this problem, but with no luck.  It has also been mentioned 
before on the DSHIELD forum but was a brief discussion as its off topic 
on there.

As it was a few months ago, I don't have the AOL returned message to 
hand, but I will send off a few emails to AOL users in a moment and see 
if I am getting them back again.  But I think they might have removed 
the message that they send out, but the AOL users are also reporting 
that they don't get my mails when I send via the YAPS4U.NET account.

YAPS4U.NET was hosted on a shared server many years ago, and someone 
else on that same machine got the IP blacklisted on DSBL.  That was a 
brief error and it has never appeared on any such blacklists either.

The return message from AOL, redefined said 'they would not accept email 
from the mail server yaps4u.net as this server had been identified as 
responsible for reporting SPAM.  I say again, reporting SPAM.

The mail to the AOL user was nothing to do with SPAM, it was just a 
personal or business reply to them.   I tried sending email from other 
accounts and there was no problem, it was only when I used the 
YAPS4U.NET domain which is the same mail server I use to report mail to 
SPAMCOP.

I've sent a few mails to various AOL users to see what I get back, and 
if I get the same or similar message, I'll post it here.  I'll also go 
back over my backups/archives and see if I can find the original return 
message.

It did strike me as very strange at the time, and I did confirm that the 
message came from AOL, so it was a definite return message from their 
server.

Regards

Chris

Mike Easter wrote:
> Chris Wright wrote:
> 
>> A good few months back I started getting failure messages back from
>> AOL when I used accounts that I forward SPAM from to SPAMCOP.
> 
> I'm not clear on what you are saying yet, but at first glance it might
> sound like you were doing something wrong, like reporting your own
> provider.
> 
> You didn't define the scenario with sufficient detail and clarity that I
> am getting the picture yet.
> 
>> Something along the lines of "AOL is not able to process your email
>> because it comes from a domain that reports SPAM".
> 
> So far that story doesn't make any sense to me yet and I know of no such
> AOL error message.  I'm going to put an example of an AOL mailbounce
> message below^3, obtained from the AOL postmaster faq information page
> http://postmaster.info.aol.com/selfhelp/index.html
> 
> You are saying you have multiple mail accounts.  You are saying some of
> those accounts are used to forward spam [not SPAM, see below^1] to
> spamcop for purposes of reporting
> 
> The way spam reporting is supposed to work is that the reporter submits
> a spam to the parser, I recommend the webparser when you are learning
> and fine tuning your spam reporting.  I also recommend that you
> understand the structure of mail headers.
> 
> Altho' maybe an 'ordinary' mail recipient might have less need to
> understand headers, someone who is taking the role of being a spam
> reporter, which function causes IP addresses to become blocklisted,
> needs to have a better understanding -- because they have a higher level
> of responsibility for their actions.
> 
> If someone is spam reporting with spamcop, and that reporting activity
> is causing their own provider's IP address to become spamcop
> blocklisted, then that listing of their own provider is going to have
> trouble with its mail failing.  Problems with sending mail from listed
> servers can occur with any provider, AOL or otherwise.
> 
>> Was this ever discussed on SPAMCOP?
> 
> I haven't heard of any such thing and it also doesn't make any sense.
> 
>> I contacted the AOL users via GMAIL and forwarded
>> them a copy of the returned mail headers.
> 
> A copy of the returned mail headers?  You are saying you gmailed your
> failed recipient a copy of /what/ headers?  The headers of the AOL mail
> to you?  The headers of the mail which was rejected?  Both?  Showing
> that 'whole enchilada' [but not here, see below^2]
> 
>> ps. Hope this is the right group for this discussion.
> 
> It sounds like a great topic for discussion here, but you are going to
> have to get a lot more 'windy' and descriptive of the situation and
> provide some exact information or 'evidence' rather than a description
> of something before I understand.
> 
> 
> ^1 SPAM is the Hormel meat product, and anti-spammers and Hormel both
> agree that spam is not SPAM and we won't use the terms interchangeably
> 
> ^2 When an occasion arises in which 'ugly' mail needs to be displayed
> somewhere, which ugly means such things as complete mailheaders and
> bodies which might have attached complete mailheaders and bodies, it is
> not acceptable to post such items into the discussion groups like this
> spamcop.help or spamcop.  Originally the newsgroup spamcop.spam was
> created for that purpose.  Nowadays we do it differently and feed the
> entire mail with its contiguous headers and attachments into the
> webparser, copy the parser's tracking url, and paste the url into the
> discussion group such as this.   The tracking url looks like
> http://www.spamcop.net/sc?id=z893785525z78007b39eb7150585dfb33e7dd17d2fbz
> 
> ^3 If you are having problems sending email to America Online please
> choose the appropriate link below so we can further help you.-- I have
> the bounce error message I received in email- select one below --  I
> have the AOL specific error message (example RLY:B1) -- <then follows a
> specific example, on another different AOL postmaster page are about 60
> other examples^4 in 12 different classes>
> 
> ^4 http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/index.html Error Messages  RTR
> Blocks | HVU Blocks | DNS Blocks | RLY Blocks | ISP Blocks | HTM Blocks
> | FSV Blocks | IPT Blocks | GEN Blocks | SDI Blocks | DYN Blocks | CON
> Blocks
> 
>