no, I’m not setting up a rival international ISP with crap interface and ‘keywords’. the ‘vs’ in the heading refers to my not being able to email anyone with an aol.com or aim.com email address. This is almost certainly because both my stevelawson.net and steve-lawson.co.uk domains have been spoofed by some spamming wankers using them to send out god-knows-what, and after a certain number of spam emails received by aol users, they’ve just blacklisted the domain names. I think…
So I’ve emailed their customer services (or rather, got someone else to email their customer services, as they have an aol address so wouldn’t have got it!!!) and asked them to unblock my main email addresses (steve@ each of the domain names).
But for now, if you’re an AOL/AIM user, if you have an alternative email address, please include it when emailing me. If you’ve emailed me recently and were expecting a reply that hasn’t arrived, it may well be that I sent it and it was eaten by the AOL blacklist…
In my experience it’s rare for a large provider to add a domain name to a blacklist. They’re usually populated by IP addresses, and IPs are added if they (or IPs close to them) have been used as spam relays. It’d be worth checking with your email server provider to make sure their email server is secured, and then asking them to contact AOL to ask for the IP address to be removed from the list.
Sounds like your mail provider needs to set their Reverse DNS correctly: When my provider (me, alas) had their rDNS set wrongly (i.e. not at all) AOL bounced all my messages. Once it was set up correctly, everything went swimmingly. Look for information in the server logs (I was getting SMTP 4XX responses, though Ican’t remember exactly which one)