UPDATE - This update was originally scheduled for December 1, 2005; however, AOL has been blocking our email every day as we keep changing IP's. It is crucial that everyone can email AOL without any problems. We will be making this effective today.

WHAT? Policy change regarding e-mail forwarders to aol.com for our shared and reseller customers.

WHEN? Effective 11/22/05

IMPACT? E-mail forwarders to aol.com will cease operation We are unfortunately needing to make a policy change which will affect e-mail forwarders on our shared / reseller hosting accounts.

Effective 12/1/05 we will block all e-mail forwards to the AOL.com domain. This is being done due to AOL's ineffective spam filtering which is causing our mail server to be blacklisted by AOL.

Just to briefly explain the issue behind this decision, here is what AOL is doing, which causes our mail server to be blacklisted.

If one of our customers has a forwarder setup to AOL, our mail server receives the mail, then resends it to the customer's aol.com e-mail address. When the AOL customer opens the mail in the AOL e-mail client, they have the option to report spam via an automated system. If that spam was forwarded by our mail server, AOL will incorrectly identify us as the source of the spam, since they only look at which server delivered to them. As a result our mail server gets blacklisted, not the actual spammer's.

Even though we nor our customers are guilty of spamming, this imprecise and inaccurate method of spam reporting/tracking by AOL is causing legitimate mail destined to AOL customers to be blocked, so we have made the difficult decision to prevent forwarders to the AOL.com domain. If you or your customers have forwarders configured in SmarterMail to an AOL e-mail address, please reconfigure them to hit a different e-mail address not associated with AOL, or convert them to POP3 accounts by 12/1/05 or you may experience delivery issues.

Please let us know if you have any questions or need assistance finding an alternative to mail being forwarded to AOL.

Note: This will only affect forwarders configured on the mail server. It will not prevent you from sending mail to AOL through your e-mail client or web based e-mail. This change will actually help make mail delivery to AOL more reliable since they won't be incorrectly blacklisting our mail servers due to forwarders.

If you have any further questions, please contact our support team by mailing support@easyasphosting.com or visiting http://helpdesk.easyasphosting.com.