Hi:

Regarding AOL's blacklisting of (some? all?) pilot.msu.edu servers while
mail.msu.edu would be less likely to be blacklisted due to the authenti-
cation requirement, it occurs to me that it may be time again to point
the "msu.edu" MX DNS record at mail.msu.edu servers instead of pilot
servers.  I seem to recall that this was done for a while until the
stability problems with mail.msu.edu arose, and then was switched back
(correct me if I am misremembering).

I have already gotten a complaint from a professor whose mail to one of
his students, addressed to "[log in to unmask]" where xxxxxxxx was the
student's MSUNet ID, bounced -- the student had set a forwarding address
to an AOL account.  AOL saw the E-mail come from one of the blacklisted
pilot servers and bounced it.

It may not really make much of a difference, in that if a user has not
converted to mail.msu.edu, the mail will probably still have pilot as
its last stop before heading out to AOL (as mail.msu.edu would probably
forward a message to pilot.msu.edu for an un-converted user), but if the
user has converted already, then the mail message never has to touch pilot
systems at all.

Now that mail.msu.edu appears to have stabilized, however, the DNS record
change may just be a good idea for pilot system load reasons, independent
of AOL's blacklist.  Anyway, it's a thought I had.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
George J Perkins                  http://www.pa.msu.edu/people/perkins/
1209B BPS Bldg, MSU               Phone: 517-355-9200 ext 2567
East Lansing, MI  48824-2320        FAX: 517-353-4500