The other day my wife asked me what the following meant in an email:
----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
<xxxxxxx@aol.com>
(reason: 554-: (RLY:CH) http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/554rlych.html)Hmmm…I started looking and it appears that AOL had decided to block all email originating from my server’s IP address. After a bit of research, it appears that instead of unsubscribing from mailing lists, users have been hitting the “This is spam” button in AOL. After a number of these, AOL automatically blocks email. So, I turned off all email lists that I run (except for 1) and won’t turn on more in the future. I then called AOL (you have to actually call them and request to be unblocked). As my wife sends email to AOL all the time and the one mailing list I’m keeping has AOL email addresses, I had to find a workaround. I have 5 static IP addresses, so I thought that if I could rewrite the headers for all outbound traffic going to AOL to use a different IP address, I could get around the block until AOL lifted it. I series of iptables rules did the trick:
-A POSTROUTING -p tcp --dport 25 -o eth0 -d 64.12.137.184 -j SNAT --to x.x.x.x
Where the first address is one of AOL’s email servers (I did this for all their servers listed as MX hosts) and the second is my alternate IP address.
Excellent, problem diverted. Well, AOL said that the block would be lifted in 48 hours; that was Monday evening. It’s now Friday and the block finally got lifted, so I was able to remove my workaround.
Lessons learned: 1) avoid running mailing lists for people that don’t have a clue and 2) sign up with AOL’s Feedback Loop so that you get notified each time a user reports your email as spam so you can head this off before it becomes a problem.
Sometimes running my own server is a lot more trouble than it is worth.