Category Archives: midrange.com

AOL and TOS

The other day, while upgrading SpamAssassin, I was watching the maillog scroll past.

I noticed that AOL rejected some of my mail … indicating a URL that I should visit for information.

Turns out some AOL subscriber had reported mail from my server for TOS violations.

Obviously in the mail log there is not useful information about who did the reporting … so I visited the URL. There was information available on how to sign up to be whitelisted by the AOL mail servers and participate in the TOS ‘feedback’ loop. This is where AOL will send a specific email address (an abuse address, generally) messages that are reported as TOS violations.

So I signed up for this and got confirmation that my servers were accepted.

I figure that the person who is reporting the list messages to TOS just wants to get unsubscribed from the list (and can’t read enough english to notice that unsubscribe instructions are at the bottom of every list message).

So today I got my first feedback loop message.

Unfortunately, there’s no indication in the reported message as to WHO reported it to TOS.
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Cookout and Archives

Today was a somewhat busy day … went to the annual Broadband Reports Chicago / SBC – Ameritech Midwest Cookout held at kcazzie‘s house.

It was enjoyable … lots of yaking about geeky stuff.

When I got home I started working on implementing a requested feature for the mailing list archives so that the number of results / page could be selected and remembered. Took a few hours to code and test, but it appears to be working well.

I also used the change as an opportunity to change the way the list index pages are generated … now I’m using Jamon … which is a nice templating engine for Java. I’m not using nearly all the capabilities of the package, but I’m pleased with the results.