Superman Through the Ages! Forum

There are a few people on this forum who use their AOL email address for their forum acount.

It turns out that AOL is now blocking all email from the "Superman Through the Ages!" webserver, so none of you are receiving your account activation emails, your topic-reply notifications, your "private message" alerts, or the results of your requests for your password.

They are all bouncing back and including this URL

http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/421dynt1.html

as part of their error message.  AOL thinks that this server is a source of spam so is blocking emails from it.

I've followed the instructions on that page and filled out the forms to get on AOL's "whitelist," but I haven't heard back from them and I'm not going to spend too much more of my time jumping through their hoops and trying to get a reasonable response from a huge mindless corporation.

In the meantime, if you want to get full use out of this forum, you should enter another email address - a non-AOL one.

I would recommend a free website base e-mail, like Yahoo, Hotmail, G-Mail, etc.

Sorry, but that's AOL for ya! Overpriced and inconvenient  :?

Don't forget this one (http://superman.nu/a/email/).

It's a royal pain, but you get a cool email address.

:s:

Perhaps the coolest :D

Everyone on my usual mail list thats uses AOL delays my mail from my msn,. account. Me thinks its a plot to get everyone on the AOHell bandwagon.

Indeed, the coolest. I like to give my fortress-of-solitude.net adress to my friends.

JulianPerez and King Krypton, this means you.

:s:

AOL just keeps giving me a harder and harder time.

I've blocked registrations from any AOL addresses in order to prevent problems.

:s:

<sigh>  I used to have a few "live" contacts at AOL, but they've cashed out their options and are in various stages of retirement.  I know how to get AOL's attention if necessary, but probably not over a relatively-minor matter like this one.  Their postmaster stuff is theoretically read by some human beings, but I suspect it's heavily pre-processed (e.g. "don't elevate this to a human's queue unless 100 requests about a particular site are made in a day.")

I remember back when AOL had _one_ Internet postmaster, and he was forked off from their overall sysadmin team because email had become too large to have scattered as a "team" function.  I actually met the guy, doing some consulting work on a prototype that AOL didn't end up turning into a service at the time.  He was starting to realize they needed a 7x24 resource for the "postmaster" role, after a minor typo in a complex file for email configuration (sendmail.cf for Unix geeks) led to a story in the WSJ and a stock price warble.  This was before the "popularity" of spam, email viruses, etc. and he was already quite overwhelmed simply by the sheer magnitude of AOL's growth at that time.

Hey, I'm glad you're back. I kept going to the old site and getting the parked domain page until a friend pointed me to the new server. Whew! I thought we'd lost you forever.

Anyway, I just got an error a few minutes ago that asked me if I wanted to download the "index.php" file when I click on the "reply" button. Looks like the new server needs a bit of a shakedown cruise. :)

I've been reading the AOL issue with some interest. I had a similar problem on my server, almost exactly a year ago. Here's my solution:

http://www.sherwoodnation.net/sysinfo/?p=5

I had the issue with Joomla, but if I remember correctly, SMF has a similar set up for mail and the link above may explain your problem. It's kind of a long read, and maybe more technically-oriented than you might want, so here's the shorthand part:

***************************
SOLUTION:

Ok, that was an easy one! :)

Joomla can send e-mail automatically to users three ways:

   1. PHP Mail Function
   2. Sendmail
   3. SMTP Server

Each has its advantages, but the first two (apparently) have one, big problem: They both send mail out with apache@mydomainname.com in the “Return-Path” line! This works just fine, so long as you tell Joomla to send out all mail using that e-mail address, and as long as that domain name is not a VIRTUAL domain.

In reality, your webserver wants only one domain name to call itself. It recognizes all the others I use, but for default uses, including sending e-mail through PHP or the sendmail program, it chooses the first one listed in the /etc/hosts file. In my instance, that’s sherwoodnation.net. Simple, doesn’t offend anyone, and works well as a generic domain. Virtual domains are any additional domains you want to add (i.e. heresmyprice.com). That’s where AOL (and a few other ISP’s) run into a problem with the way it’s done. If the “Return-Path” address doesn’t match the “From:” address, it’s automatically marked as spam and rejected.

Using the SMTP option forces the server to insert the e-mail address used in the “From:” line into the “Return-Path” line. Problem solved!