This is not surprising to me. I work for a fairly large local telephone company and AOL did the same exact thing to the ISP portion of our business. It took us a week and a half to get through to someone at AOL that knew what we were even talking about and had the power to do something about it. Then we had to jump through hoops to get them to reinstate our ability to send them email. They didn't contact us to proactively and constructively solve the issue without all of our clients being potentially affected. AOL's incompetence is so unbelievable they try to shift blame on everyone else. Our company already proactively shuts down spammers or other abusers to our TOS, but you know when big bad egocentric AOL says something it's their way or the highway. At least after we shut our customers down we call them to say why and work with them to get them back up and running if they were victims rather than pupotraters. AOL just angers me to no end. Unfortunately I used to work for AOL, which further reinforces my opinion they have a corporate culture of stupidity.
In short I totally understand and it sucks we have to bend over backwards to do anything for AOL.