Fri Aug 15 06:24:37 PDT 1997 — AOL still hasn’t fixed their mail problem. We’ve isolated the problem to high-volume mailing lists, specifically: ‘sammyhagar’, ‘rent,’ and ‘vanhalen’. Sendmail has a terrible problem with delivery to high-volume mailing lists. This is a flaw in its design. Fortunately, we have alternatives to effect mail delivery. The most popular solution is ‘qmail,’ and it is very fast. We are now running qmail on our outbound mail server, which handles mail destined for sites out on the Internet. Apparently, once we implented qmail, the extreme volume and efficency of these mailing lists triggered AOL’s spam filters. This wasn’t obvious at first. To prevent mail bounces, we held all mail to AOL. Now that we know what their problem is, we are delivering all mail to AOL except the high-volume mailing lists mentioned above. Specifically, we’ve implemented a solution that defers mail _from_ these lists, _to_ AOL, while still performing normal delivery.
In other words, mail to AOL is now working, except for the high-volume lists. Please visit news:sonic.net for further discussion of the AOL problem. -Scott