Sick of the AOL email forwarding problem? Try this add-on.

[Codeguy]

Comcast does the exact same thing.

[chirpy]

This may seem like a harsh treatment, but its the only way I can see where you can keep your server free of any blocking from other services because of spam forwarded e-mails.

That seems like a good idea to me. If you also add a little education of end-users in how to POP more than one account would make it less harsh a policy.

[graham_w]

Thanks for the script - I modified it from AOL to another ISP we are having similar trouble with and it works perfectly. Thanks!

[GTFO]

Not to be rude, but i've achieved the same results in shell by

cd /etc/valiases/
grep aol * >> /root/aol-forwarders

Domain names are listed in the aol-forwarders file, etc. Does this script do any more than that specifically?

[perlchild]

I think this is a great idea! I agree that if people want to receive email at an outside address they should give out their outside address, and if they give out their hosted domain address they should be required to pick it up off the server. I use internal forwards a lot so internal forwards need to be kept.

Why can't you just use mail routing(aka ldap) instead? Or better yet, why not upgrade smtp(you'd have to rename it to something else I think) to a level where this isn't such a problem? It's getting to the point where 80% of the email traffic unrelated and orthogonal, that is, unrelated, to the design goals of the protocol. Can we finally ask the IETF for a successor protocol which doesn't place such a burden on the isps?

[cjmwebdesigns]

I am going to give this script a shot to let me see how many AOL Forwarders I currently have, but, I have not been having any real issues with AOL at this time.

Presently my company has a Feedback Loop with AOL that I signed up for on their postmater page. http://postmaster.aol.com/

I am guessing that this may have helped due to the fact that I had some major issue at one point from someone spoofing me or using my server due to the fact that it is an open relay.

Some of my customers do use the forwarding and I see these, I have asked them not to mark them as spam if that review the to address and see it as myname@thedomain.com rather than myaccount@aol.com.

Spam Stinks!

[wsherwood]

We were just blocked.
It was NOT because [REPORT SPAM] was clicked on a message FORWARDED from our servers,
but instead because a message that was forwarded had THE CONTENT of a message that CONTAINED the TEXT of a domain name that is on their blacklist.

AOL postmaster support agreed that we were not sending the spam; they also agreed that no complaints arose from messages FORWARDED from our servers. It was just the fact that some forwarded messages contained domain name text matches that had been REPORT SPAM reported via other emails unrelated to us.

Guilt by association.