From: Carl Hutzler [XXX@aol.com]
Sent: Tue 4/25/2006 7:02 AM
To: ip@v2.listbox.com; David Farber
Subject: Update [Re: [IP] AOL blocking Gmail]
 
As promised, an update.

Late last night around 11pm, we added into our whitelist a number of 
Gmail IP addresses for their outbound systems. Evidently gmail had sent 
us an email asking for more servers to be added to our whitelist for 
protection but had done so at 4:45pm yesterday. The request had not yet 
been processed. I esclaated internally and they got it done. So all is 
well now.

So now we will have to see if gmail's outbound spam problem is high on 
their list to fix or whether they are more interested in adding capacity 
to accommodate the increase in outbound spam,  umm mail ;-)

Oh, and one other thing, all their spam is domainkeys signed. This 
emergency whitelisting combined with the fact that all their spam is 
signed is a little ironic if you have been following the dearaol.com 
debate. ;-)

-Carl

Date: April 24, 2006 5:05:08 PM EDT
To: dave@farber.net
Subject: AOL blocking Gmail

Dave, just had a lively and interesting conversation with an AOL
postmaster phone number.  When they get reports from their users of
spam from a given host, they start rate-limiting mail from that
source.  When a given source is huge, it's inevitable that there will
be spam-marked mail from within that space, and even if it's just
amateur users who mark as spam mail that comes to them that they don't
want to see, whether it's spam or not:  with two larger user bases, it
can easily add up to a number of complaints that triggers aol's
mechanism.

So, net result, if you have a gmail account and try to write to
aol.com addresses now, you will probably not get through immediately.
You will probably get a message from google telling you that your
message has been delayed and giving an aol postmaster address,
http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/421rlynw.html, that tells you
that your site (i.e., Gmail) is being rate-limited and delayed inbound
to aol.

AOL's response to a complaint is to tell the Gmail user to tell Google
that there's a problem.  Clash of the titans?