Blocked AOL email? Here’s why…

14th April 2006

Several web hosting customers have reported that their email to AOL members has been occasionally undeliverable. After a bit of research, and I’ve discovered why…

Some people have their own domain names hosted with PDXTC, yet continue to have their email forwarded through our system to their AOL addresses because it’s easier for them.

When those same people get spam in their AOL box, they report to AOL using the methods from inside their AOL software. Then AOL looks to see WHERE those spam messages are coming from, and keeps track.

As far as AOL can tell, the IP addresses that those spam messages come from are the PDXTC servers, and after too many in a day, they bounce our mail.

So, if you have webhosting with PDXTC, and you forward your email to an AOL address, please stop reporting messages as spam to AOL, because AOL seeks to block the last sender, (us) and not the originator of the spam, and that effects everyone on our servers.

As I said, we are whitelisted now, but we will continue to have to answer to AOL when this happens, and reapply to the white list if we get kicked off.