Attention AOL users

[Uncle Mxy]

<sigh>  I used to have a few "live" contacts at AOL, but they've cashed out their options and are in various stages of retirement.  I know how to get AOL's attention if necessary, but probably not over a relatively-minor matter like this one.  Their postmaster stuff is theoretically read by some human beings, but I suspect it's heavily pre-processed (e.g. "don't elevate this to a human's queue unless 100 requests about a particular site are made in a day.")

I remember back when AOL had _one_ Internet postmaster, and he was forked off from their overall sysadmin team because email had become too large to have scattered as a "team" function.  I actually met the guy, doing some consulting work on a prototype that AOL didn't end up turning into a service at the time.  He was starting to realize they needed a 7x24 resource for the "postmaster" role, after a minor typo in a complex file for email configuration (sendmail.cf for Unix geeks) led to a story in the WSJ and a stock price warble.  This was before the "popularity" of spam, email viruses, etc. and he was already quite overwhelmed simply by the sheer magnitude of AOL's growth at that time.

[EricInHouston]

Hey, I'm glad you're back. I kept going to the old site and getting the parked domain page until a friend pointed me to the new server. Whew! I thought we'd lost you forever.

Anyway, I just got an error a few minutes ago that asked me if I wanted to download the "index.php" file when I click on the "reply" button. Looks like the new server needs a bit of a shakedown cruise.

I've been reading the AOL issue with some interest. I had a similar problem on my server, almost exactly a year ago. Here's my solution:

http://www.sherwoodnation.net/sysinfo/?p=5

I had the issue with Joomla, but if I remember correctly, SMF has a similar set up for mail and the link above may explain your problem. It's kind of a long read, and maybe more technically-oriented than you might want, so here's the shorthand part:

***************************
SOLUTION:

Ok, that was an easy one!

Joomla can send e-mail automatically to users three ways:

   1. PHP Mail Function
   2. Sendmail
   3. SMTP Server

Each has its advantages, but the first two (apparently) have one, big problem: They both send mail out with apache@mydomainname.com in the “Return-Path” line! This works just fine, so long as you tell Joomla to send out all mail using that e-mail address, and as long as that domain name is not a VIRTUAL domain.

In reality, your webserver wants only one domain name to call itself. It recognizes all the others I use, but for default uses, including sending e-mail through PHP or the sendmail program, it chooses the first one listed in the /etc/hosts file. In my instance, that’s sherwoodnation.net. Simple, doesn’t offend anyone, and works well as a generic domain. Virtual domains are any additional domains you want to add (i.e. heresmyprice.com). That’s where AOL (and a few other ISP’s) run into a problem with the way it’s done. If the “Return-Path” address doesn’t match the “From:” address, it’s automatically marked as spam and rejected.

Using the SMTP option forces the server to insert the e-mail address used in the “From:” line into the “Return-Path” line. Problem solved!