[This message was cross-posted to LSTSRV-L, but please follow up discussions on LSTOWN-L. Thanks.] Hi all, and apologies for a late and ungraceful entrance to this list. My name is Jay Levitt, and I'm the manager of the Mail Systems development group at AOL. I'm also involved to some extent in operational issues, and this brings me here today. First and foremost, I need to apologize on behalf of AOL for the recent mail-blocking snafus and the poor follow-up communication. I don't think we need to revisit everything that happened; let's just say that I intend to avoid a repeat. Now, down to business. As you know, we've fixed the way we handle mail from source-routed addresses, and I don't believe that anyone's *current* problems are caused by this. Another change we made, though, is to block mail from sites that have a very large number of bounces in a very short period of time. This is NOT a pure spam-fighting effort, although it had the effect of stopping a lot of spam, at least for the short term. Rather, it's due to the fact that the large volumes of mail sent to invalid recipients was causing us some operational problems. We're between a rock and a hard place. If we block mail based on this (or any!) criteria, we risk blocking some legitimate mail. However, if we don't, we risk facing denial of service issues, since we don't have infinite server capacity. We've already seen some slow mail days here, and things could get worse before they get better. This particular blocking is especially troublesome for list owners, since AOL's mail bounce format isn't parsed automatically by LISTSERV. This makes it difficult to prune AOL members from your lists, and so it's more likely that you'll have lots of invalid AOL names on your list. Which is something none of us want. (A side note: setting your list to SHORTHDR format will not save you; it will only make list processing less efficient for your system and ours.) So what are we doing? Well, first of all, rest assured that broad-brush mail blocking is not a long-term approach. Right now, we're taking efforts that give us the biggest bang for the buck, so we can ensure that we continue delivering most of the mail quickly most of the time. That's not exactly an inspiring quality goal, but it is better than slow mail. Over the next few months, you'll see a lot of positive developments as we roll out our new inbound gateway software, written from the ground up to process mail efficiently. One of the biggest wins for you as listowners is that this new gateway software can detect and reject invalid recipients DURING the SMTP transaction. Translation: LISTSERV will automatically take care of your AOL bounces. This software will also let us take a much more surgical approach to spam, so that we'll be much less likely to put legitimate list mail in harm's way. And last, the new gateways are approximately a bazillion times faster and more efficient than the old ones, which means your AOL subscribers will be getting their list mail on time, all the time. "That's nice, Jay, but what do I do for now?" Well, for starters: If you think your list is being blocked from AOL, send me e-mail with the name of the list. I will research it and get back to you. Put "LIST BLOCKED" in the subject so it jumps out at me. Include a contact phone number if you'd like a voice call; personally, I prefer to solve problems like this over the phone in real time, not through e-mail tag. If we did in fact block your list, we will work with you to unblock it and help you clean out your mailing list so you won't trigger the auto-blocker again. "But why should I have to be the one to contact AOL?" You shouldn't. I'm going to see if we can modify the auto-blocker to send mail to the list owner if it sees the telltale LISTSERV-style names when it blocks a list. But that's later, this is now, and I want to start solving things NOW. Executive summary: I'm here to talk, to help, and to make sure we keep the phone lines open. I think things are going to get a lot better (what else could they get?) and that we can work around the current problems. Jay Levitt Manager, Mail Systems Group America Online, Inc. [log in to unmask]