A rash of email delivery problems this past week at America Online - including the clogging of several Internet mailing lists - have been caused mainly by the company's spam-fighting efforts, officials at the Dulles, Virginia-based company, claim.
Last Friday, AOL chief Steve Case had affirmed a beefing up of the company's email capabilities in his latest "Community Update" column, saying that recent efforts to improve system quality included AOL's increased ability to handle email, and that the number of incoming messages the service could handle was up to almost 400 million per month.
But while Case's words rang in the background, a portion of the email messages directed at AOLers from the rest of the Net took up to five days to arrive - or simply bounced back to the sender.
Alex Phillips, an administrator at Rockingham Internet Community Access, said the problem caused his company to have almost 8,000 messages to AOL addresses pile up on his email server.
"It seemed to be localized to select domains on the Net," he said. "Many messages from other ISPs in the country were flowing just fine. Our mail server is in Boise, Idaho, and trace routes to AOL's mail server were showing no response from their St. Louis hop for about a week."
The problem was especially harsh on mailing lists, where copies of each post would get forwarded to each AOL subscriber on that list, and either bounce back to the moderator or pile up in the list's email queue.
The Searoom-l, a list for the discussion of wooden sailing ships, was one of the many lists that felt the curse of AOL email last week. In a message posted to the list, list moderator John Berg had said, "AOL changed their software which rejects incoming messages. We can see Searoom-l subscribers' messages, but they can't see ours, because AOL's new software doesn't accept our messages."
AOL spokeswoman Tricia Primrose said the problem was an internal gaffe, caused by an effort to stop spam by selectively blocking incoming email messages. "I talked to one of our operations guys and he verified that we did have a problem last week," she said. "We're aggressive in protecting our members from spam, and we put in a change last week to block it out - and it unintentionally blocked some incoming listserv mail as well."
The default mail setting for AOLers is PreferredMail, which filters incoming email from a list of rogue domains and spammers. The list of sites is available to AOL members by an internal AOL document called "PreferredMail - The Guard Against Junk E-mail," Primrose said.
A court order last year had limited the notorious spam factory Cyber Promotions to sending to AOL from only five domains, which AOL has put on its PreferredMail filter list. The list is updated when users forward copies of spam to the AOL screen name TOSSPAM.
Primrose noted that the PreferredMail option could be disabled, should the user want to receive unsolicited commercial email, but that "the vast majority of our members don't like spam."
Email delivery problems have plagued AOL for some time - a lag between the steady influx of AOL customers and the company's equipment upgrades have put a strain both on its system and the rest of the Net. One month ago, a huge backlog of AOL mail was returned to sender to the University of Madison's email server, causing it to crash.
"We're constantly scaling our architecture to increase the demand," says Primrose, noting that internal mail down times do occur, usually lasting from 15 minutes to 2 hours in length. She said AOL has seen email "increase dramatically in the last five months, coinciding with our switch to flat-rate pricing, and going from 5 million to 12 million messages a day."
