Trouble Receiving Mail From AOL
by George RobertsWe’ve been receiving reports of people with email addresses @aol.com and @aim.com having trouble sending mail to domains protected by our service. We’ve been researching and troubleshooting and have come to the conclusion that this must be an internal AOL issue. In short, AOL’s mail servers are saying that they can’t resolve the DNS entries to get an IP address for our gateways. We’ve tested our DNS from multiple locations on multiple networks and can find no problems.
We just got off the phone with AOL, who was completely unhelpful, unfortunately. The specifically said the only thing that can be done is for the people with AOL email addresses to contact AOL support to have them look into it. Apparently AOL’s Postmaster group only handles mail that AOL receives, not their outbound mail, and there is no way for a service provider like us to get into contact with the group that handles AOL’s OUTBOUND mail. It’s up to the individual AOL users to address their issues with support.
Not really the answer we wanted to hear. Unfortunately, it appears that the users who have AOL addresses need to contact AOL support to ask them to look into it.




July 31st, 2008 at 9:59 am
Some domains get mail from aol.com and others do not. I sent you headers from both working and not working on a support ticket.
mail coming from imo-d23.mx.aol.com worked
mail coming from imo-m21.mx.aol.com did not work
July 31st, 2008 at 2:10 pm
It is an issue with AOL’s outgoing mail clusters. I have been sending test messages all day to try to narrow it down. See list of mailservers on this page:
http://postmaster.info.aol.com/servers/imo.html
The two clusters that bounce EVERY time are:
imo-m[11-14].mx.aol.com
imo-m[19-28].mx.aol.com
I contacted AOL and they are useless and told me to wait the 24-48 hours for their operations teams. Obviously we can’t wait, so here is what I did to fix the issue.
Created an A record smtp.mydomain.com that points to the g1 server IP (this is the one i’m assigned to).
Change the domain MX records to point to smtp.mydomain.com
Since making this change I have not receive any bounces…even through the above clusters.
Give it a try…it might help.