SmarterMail 4.x and email to AOL and Yahoo

[DXD]

AOL the biggest pain
Yahoo and close second

I'm having to contact AOL a few times a day now to unblock our servers. How is everyone else dealing with this?

What I've found is customers setup forwards on their email accounts to forward their email to their aol and yahoo account and then when spam comes to them that gets passed SM4 it's forwarded to their aol account which either marks it as spam or goes into their in box. The real kicker is then the customer marks the email as spam even though it came through their own domain so instead of blocking the originator they are blocking them selves which in turn makes AOL and Yahoo block the whole IP address.

What can I do? :bang:

[ender]

Having seen/heard of this issue in many places, the only real "solution" I've come across is not to let people forward mail to AOL/Yahoo!.

[DXD]

Having seen/heard of this issue in many places, the only real "solution" I've come across is not to let people forward mail to AOL/Yahoo!.

Unfortunatly the option for that would be either allow it or not allow forwarding at all not sure of a way to block forwarding to Yahoo and AOL.

All I know is calling AOL 2-3 times a day and talking to them is not fun. Especially when you do not get the help you are looking for.

[jasonaward]

AOL provides whitelisting. Request to be placed on their whitelist --- that should help tremendously.

http://postmaster.aol.com/whitelist/

Yahoo, I don't know about.

I'm having an issue with Hotmail. Their requirements for whitelisting are ridiculous, and their main offering is to be validated by an external company for something like $1000 / year. Yeah, right.

-- edit --

It looks like Yahoo offers whitelisting too. I've just filled it out, so I don't know the effectiveness of it yet.

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/yahoomail/postmaster/bulk.html

[flc]

This should help...
http://help.smartertools.com/SmarterMail/v4/Default.aspx?p=SA&page=systemadmin/frmsmtpblockedrecipients

[DXD]

Excellent flc how I missed that I don't know.

Atleast I can do that till I can get AOL and Yahoo to atleast respond to my emails and phone numbers.

My only concern with this would be that they can not forward anything to aol/yahoo. It would be great if this only applied to accounts where they have setup and autoforward.

[inCharge.co.uk]

Stopping your customers from forwarding mail is an extreme and unnecessary measure.

You are assuming that your server's mail is being blocked because of the spam content, but it might just be the quantity of mail.

We had the same problem with mail being delayed 24 hours. We solved it by
1) making sure the server config looks squeaky clean. The mail server's HELO was specifying a server name that wasn't set up in DNS, so we added it.
2) Filling in the whitelist application forms mentioned above
3) Reducing the 1st retry to 5 mins. Even after 1) and 2), customers complained that mail was taking 30 mins to come through, which was the retry interval. Apparently Yahoo rejects all mail on the 1st attempt, but it's accepted on the retry 5 mins later.

If this hadn't worked then we were going to look at implementing domain keys.