Has anyone experienced problems when customers try to use AOL to connect via POP to their e-mail accounts on your server? One of my customers is very frustrated because their e-mail, especially with attachments, seems to always delayed by many hours when they send from home using their AOL account. They're POPing in throught Outlook.

I'm using Vircom's Vopmail e-mail server and haven't had any other problems before this. Everything I've checked leads me to believe AOL is the culprit, but I've got to convince the customer of that.

Also, they seem to be having trouble receiving e-mail from some customers and not others. I checked their DNS (which is hosted by eNom) and found out their MX record was not set. I'm guessing this could be the root of that problem.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance,
Tony

Originally posted by flyguy1996
One of my customers is very frustrated because their e-mail, especially with attachments, seems to always delayed by many hours when they send from home using their AOL account.

You said they were having problems with POP, but this statement quoted above seems to indicate the problem is actually with SMTP. So it would help if you clarify - is the problem happening when they *receive* mail, or when they *send* it?

If it's happening when they receive mail, I can't help you I'm afraid. But if it's a sending problem, it's definitely AOL. The way AOL works is that *any* e-mail being sent out port 25 is routed through their own SMTP servers. It doesn't matter what your client has specified as an SMTP server, if it tries to connect through port 25 AOL will route that connection through their own SMTP servers and won't ever let it reach your SMTP server.

Because of this - if they're sending mail and the mail is delayed, blame AOL - it's never even touching your equipment.

Good luck,

Jason

Thanks, Jason,

You're right, I was primarily talking outgoing traffic over AOL, so SMTP.

So even though they're connecting to my mail server via Port 25, the traffic is still routed through AOL's SMTP? I'm not surprised. I ran into this problem with MSN. I convinced the customer to try using the webmail I have installed so they didn't have to use AOL to send and receive and naturally the attachment was shot out immediately. But the customer is adverse to change so she wants another solution. I can't think of any, so I guess she's going to have to live with it. Sounds like it's out of my control.

I was told AOL might also que e-mail so that those with larger attachments may be put to the back of the list (or processed at night) so those smaller e-mails that can go out more quickly. I knew I hated AOL, but this adds one more thing to the list!

have sendmail listen on another port?

have sendmail listen on another port?

I have a feeling that would open up a can of worms I'm not ready to deal with yet ;)

I think there may have been a number of things happening contributing to these problems including some anti-bulk e-mail filtering and Reverse SMTP lookups that could have been dropping e-mail.

Some providers don't configure their reverse DNS lookups right, and the way I had it set, if my server tried to validate the e-mail and can't identify where it's coming from, it probably kicked it back.

Originally posted by flyguy1996
So even though they're connecting to my mail server via Port 25, the traffic is still routed through AOL's SMTP?

Yep - and it's easy to confirm this, too. When dialed into AOL, just open a dos prompt and try to telnet to your mail servers on port 25. It'll come back with responses from AOL's SMTP servers, not yours.

And you might be right about AOL placing messages with attachments at a low priority - it certainly would make mail delivery faster for the majority of customers (but would piss off the few that needed to send large attachments).