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RE: A Cautionary Tale concerning AOL

2004-11-05 07:35:59

One thing that AOL screwed up on: they drop the connection rather than
issuing a 5xx status.  The end user sees "connection dropped, 
will retry
for the next 12 days" and there is no indication of why there is a
problem.  AOL issues a 2xx status, with human readable text providing
the URL above and then drops the connection.  This is very wrong.
They should issue a 5xx status so that the MTA knows to pass the
error on to the user.

This is incorrect.  No connections are ever dropped in an effort to fight
spam.  I obviously cannot claim connections are never dropped, but if we
want to block your mail, we just do so, we never attempt to hide this fact.
For that matter, no email is ever silently deleted either.  All email is
either blocked, (ie, issued a 421, 554, 550) or delivered.  However, I will
point out that if we send a 220 status upon opening a connection, we do
reserved the right to issue a failure code later on in the transaction,
potentially after the "mail from" or the "data" section.

Let me know if I can provide anymore clarification on or off list.

-Brian.

Brian Barrios
703.265.7456 / IM: BrianAntiSpam
Antispam/Postmaster Group - America Online, Inc.

 


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