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Yesterday our help desk staff began receiving calls from customers whose mail to AOL addresses had bounced. Investigation shows that AOL has begun blocking email sent via Pilot servers. Here's why: various worms, viruses, and other critters find their way onto end user PCs and begin generating massive amounts of email. At MSU they accomplish this by relaying through Pilot, which accepts such relays from computers with msu.edu. When AOL detects a server behaving this way, they block the server from delivering any mail to any aol.com address. The solution for Pilot users who can't get mail through to AOL correspondents is to upgrade to mail.msu.edu. Because mail.msu.edu requires authenticated connections, it will not accept attempts by these worms/viruses/spammers to relay through its servers. It is necessary for Pilot to continue to accept mail relays from msu.edu addresses for legitimate purposes, so it appears likely that the AOL blocks for Pilot servers will be permanent. Of course, as always, we encourage all end users to use current antivirus protection on their desktop computers. Notice has been posted to help.msu.edu/status . We'll update the entry if status changes. /rich