Question for AOL folks

[willowisp]

Yesterday I once again tried to e-mail Grandma at aohell, and once again it bounced as no such user. I get that sometimes even when replying to an e-mail I know is valid. Andy is pretty certain they're bouncing mail based on our ISP, which is a national cable provider which has, no doubt, produced its share of spam over the years. Given my hatred of spam I can almost consider it worth it, if it wasn't getting in the way of my talking to my Grandma. So, a few questions:

I've heard aohell has a whitelist function. Is this correct?

Does aohell call the whitelist first?

If there is a whitelist and aohell uses it before its domain-based filter, could someone tell me what to tell Grandma? She's extremely smart and savvy, but sometimes is intimidated by computers.

Thanks in advance!

Comments

[fenodoree.livejournal.com]

My suggestion is to create a new email account at someplace like eudoramail.com and try sending her mail from there, to start with.

Other than that, I'm not too familiar with Aol, I fear. Never recommended it, always avoided it.

Sending from neverest?

[clubjuggler.livejournal.com]

Are you sending it from neverest? I know AOL will reject e-mail from residential RoadRunner but I thought that they hadn't blocked business Roadrunner yet. There's been some discussion of this on the TriLUG list a while back and the consensus was that you probably needed to specify a smart relay host for AOL. Tell callicrates to look up "transports" for qmail if you want to do that.

Alternatively, I believe I heard that AOL was starting to use SPF. Last I heard they weren't rejecting e-mail based on that, but perhaps they are now. Are you guys publishing SPF records?