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No, John, that is not correct. As I stated in the announcement yesterday, we began getting reports on Tuesday that some mail from Pilot users to AOL addresses was being blocked by AOL. We know that at least one server, pilot05.cl.msu.edu, was being blocked on Monday morning, and yesterday afternoon it wasn't. I've attached redacted headers from an example George Perkins encountered when a Physics professor send email to his class list. One of the students was forwarding mail to his/her AOL account; AOL bounced the mail back to the prof. At least some of AOL's blocking is robotic; for instance, they rebuild their list of open relay offenders daily. But they block for reasons other than open relay; e.g., if they have flagged a server as a site originating spam. It looks like a given mail server's IP address can go on and off AOL's blacklist on a day-by-day basis. We know that users on campus with infected computers are generating large volumes of mail that appears to be through Pilot; therefore it is all but certain that AOL will block more of the Pilot servers as time goes on. What we reported yesterday has no relation to openrelay.msu.edu, though I suspect AOL is blocking mail from that address all the time. The message to end users is: -- AOL is blocking mail from Pilot users sometimes. -- If you as a Pilot user experience a problem sending mail to an aol.com address, you can avoid the problem by upgrading to mail.msu.edu. If you are forwarding mail from Pilot to an AOL address, we suggest you upgrade to mail.msu.edu so that you don't run the risk of forwarded mail bouncing. /rich > <<< 554-(RLY:B1) The information presently available to AOL indicates this > <<< 554-server is generating high volumes of member complaints from AOL's > <<< 554-server is generating high volumes of member complaints from AOL's > <<< 554-member base. Based on AOL's Unsolicited Bulk E-mail policy at > <<< 554-http://www.aol.com/info/bulkemail.html AOL may not accept further > <<< 554-e-mail transactions from this server or domain. For more information, > <<< 554 please visit http://postmaster.info.aol.com. > 554 5.0.0 s------@aol.com... Service unavailable Reporting-MTA: dns; pilot06.cl.msu.edu Received-From-MTA: DNS; kepler.pa.msu.edu Arrival-Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 16:10:16 -0400 >Ummmm - this issue of AOL blocking email from MSU mail server(s) just applies >to > mail sent from openrelay.msu.edu, right? Which, IIRC, was set up a couple of > years ago when pilot.msu.edu was beginning to get blocked because it was > relaying. So I thought the solution was that relaying was disabled on > pilot.msu.edu, and openrelay.msu.edu was created to allow relaying for those > who needed it. > >If the foregoing is correct, then it should be the case (I think?) that mailing > directly from the pilot.msu.edu server, via the TWIG web interface or the > telnet interface, should still work ok. A little experimenting on my part >seems > to show that mailing from these two 'native' server interfaces does result in > at least a couple of AOL users I know to successfully receive email sent this > way. > >Comments? Reactions? Clarifications? > >Regards, > >John Fishbeck >MSU Physical Plant Computer Systems