Email Forwarding And Aol

[Deverill]

TotalChoice Hosting, as most of you know, has in the past put into place a policy to prevent automatic email forwarding to AOL because of the way they handle spam complaints. TCH is not the only company instituting such a policy to protect their customers. (University of Florida bans it as we do, Florida State University has issues with it, and a ton of other web hosts I'll not name here have blocked forwarding to AOL)

 

Unfortunately, when someone at a place like TCH forwards emails to AOL and the AOL customer says "Report Spam", AOL assumes that the most recent sender, in this case TCH, is the spammer and adds one to a counter. When that counter gets to a magic number they block the server.

 

It has been suggested by myself and other family members in the forums here that one way around this is to use a Gmail account as an intermediate step. Forward from here to Gmail then to AOL.

 

Yesterday I was working on my Gmail filters and saw that the one set up to forward to AOL was marked as "this address had a problem" and was not working. This was done without notification and I had to open my filters to see any indication that my client wasn't getting his emails. Since he is running a business this scared me quite a bit. Fortunately it was only 2 messages that he didn't get and I forwarded them by hand.

 

This does not directly affect anything here at TCH but since we had discussed using Gmail in the past I thought I'd mention it in case anyone else was using a third party to forward to AOL. I believe that this can, and eventually will, apply to ANY forwards to AOL no matter where they come from.

 

If you're forwarding from any service to AOL check it out - you may not really be after all.