Why Does Mail Sent to AOL Bounce?

25th October 2006

Search Commander hosting clients have noticed a problem sending to AOL email addreses this week. The problem? It doesn’t arrive! Why?

As webhosts, we our hosting IP addresses from ARIN, the primary provider of IP addresses in the US and Canada.

AOL, in all their wisdom, is refusing to recognize that these new addresses exist yet, so they are blocking the mail as potential fraud, or spam. They return a cryptic message with a link to this page that says this:

554 RTR:BG

http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/554rtrbg.html

EXPLANATION:

This error indicates you are sending email from an IP address not yet delegated or allocated by the Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA), commonly referred to as a Bogon IP. Traffic originating from Bogon IP addresses is generally assumed to be illegitimate or “spoofed”.

According to Complete Whois -
“the actual term “bogons” comes from word “bogus”, as in bogus ip announcements”

The real problem is that AOL only updates the list of new IP addresses once a month, and nobody seems to be able to say why.  So, ISP’s and web hosts need to wait for problems to occur, then they report the problems to AOL, who then updates the list manually before the regularly scheduled update. It’s stupid and archaic, but then, that about sums up AOL, doesn’t it?
They’ve totally dropped the ball, but now claim 3 to 5 business days to fix. Today is day 3. On behalf of our support staff, I’m truly sorry. There was no way this problem could have been prevented or anticipated.

If it wasn’t so frustrating, it might be funny that more than ten years after I first signed on to AOL Hell, I’m still waiting for them to get their act together…