At 08:07 AM 12/21/2004, Paul Russell wrote:

>On 12/20/2004 8:29 PM, Barbara Passmore wrote:
>>To answer the question Charles Oriez asks about where I got looping in my
>>head, it was from the last paragraph of the page which comes up from the AOL
>>URL given in my first message:
>>"Please have your ISP or server administrator contact AOL for assistance.
>>The mail administrator should request a feedback loop that will alert them
>>to reported spam from their network. You can access the Feedback Loop
>>request form here."
>
>The phrase "feedback loop" does not refer to a mail looping problem. It
>refers to AOL's mechanism for forwarding AOL user spam reports to email
>administrators. For additional information, go to the AOL postmaster web
>site <http://postmaster.aol.com/> and choose 'Feedback Loop' on the main
>menu.
>
>The AOL Feedback Loop is a tool for postmasters, not list owners. Only the
>administrator of a mail or list server can register to receive AOL spam
>reports about messages sent from that server.

That particular error message referring to the Feedback Loop was consistent 
with error messages being reported on nanae and spam-l.  Based on the 
information posted  by AOL Abuse Operations I would say that Barbara's 
problem went away and will stay away.  The fact that the Tier 1 support 
folks that she talked to at AOL didn't know anything about the problem is 
also explained. Others reported similar problems trying to discuss the 
issue at that level. Their problems were augmented by their trouble 
ticketing system apparently crashing yesterday morning, so the Tier 1 help 
folks didn't have the information needed to respond intelligently to 
queries.  Below is the official word from Carl Hutzler at AOL.  Carl is 
high enough on the AOL abuse department food chain for his information to 
be "official".  This was posted to SPAM-L yesterday around 1037 EST and 
1338 EST:

 From Carl Hutzler Director, AntiSpam Operations
Yes, we had a problem. If you got a RLY:B1 from us this weekend we
apologize and this is being cleared now (or may already be clear depending).
This was a human error (a typo) on our end and triggered the event.

[and later]

Update:

1. The B1 errors were fully cleared around 11am EST.

2. A smaller set of IP addresses may be still seeing RLY:B2 errors as the
result of the same issue. This list is being compiled and will be cleared by
3pm EST.

The culprit - a one character typo in a regex. Sigh.

Sorry for the problems. We do know everyone who was affected had their
mail positively bounced back to the sender during SMTP transaction time
so we will not see bounce scatter as a result and senders will know the
mail did not get through so at least they can resend.


-= END forwarded message =-





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