Why Can't I Forward Email from My Web Site to My AOL Email Address?
These days, it's unlikely you can find a web host service that will allow forwarders from your domain to an AOL email address. When I first discovered this problem, I checked with several web host services and they all said the same thing ... here is the problem:
You setup a forwarder from your domain to your AOL account (you@yourdomain.com -> you@aol.com). Your customers happily send email to you@yourdomain.com and everything gets forwarded to you@aol.com. Life is good!
Then one day you receive spam at you@yourdomain.com which, of course, is forwarded to you@aol.com. You open your you@aol.com email box, see some spam, then click "This is spam" - but you don't realize that this piece of spam was forwarded to you from your you@yourdomain.com account. All you know is, the spam is gone, and life is good!
However, here is the problem: AOL's spam filter (wrongly) does not mark the originator of the message as the spammer - instead, it marks the last place the e-mail came from as the spammer, and the last place the e-mail came from is YOUR server (yourdomain.com). So now, without realizing it, you have marked yourdomain.com as a source of spam with AOL. But the story doesn't end there ... AOL does not simply block yourdomain.com - they block the entire server that yourdomain.com is on, which means all the other web sites that share your server (maybe hundreds of others) are now blocked by AOL, too. Then all those web site owners who share your server begin to scream at your web host service's tech support guys because they are being blocked by AOL, and your web host service has to beg, plead and cajole at AOL to unblock the server (this is no simple task because AOL is notoriously difficult to deal with).
The result is that web host services have basically just given up and made a rule: "We are not going to allow anyone to forward email to an AOL address anymore."
There are several options you have to solve the problem:
1. Don't use you@yourdomain.com at all - just use your AOL e-mail address for all correspondence.
2. Use web mail to read you@yourdomain.com, and use your AOL browser to read you@aol.com.
3. The most flexible solution of all, but more technically challenging: Setup Outlook (or whatever e-mail software you use) so it reads e-mail from both you@yourdomain.com and you@aol.com.
One e-mail software reading two email boxes - take my word for it - it makes life soooo much easier. But I know that setting up e-mail software can be challenging for some (and I don't think Outlook Express will do this - it has to be the full version of Outlook). So if you have a computer whiz friend or family member who can help set this up for you one time, it would really be worth buying him or her a dinner and a movie to do so.
Of course, there's always a 4th option to solve the problem - maybe the best solution of all:
4. Leave AOL and go with a less problematic ISP .
;-)
You setup a forwarder from your domain to your AOL account (you@yourdomain.com -> you@aol.com). Your customers happily send email to you@yourdomain.com and everything gets forwarded to you@aol.com. Life is good!
Then one day you receive spam at you@yourdomain.com which, of course, is forwarded to you@aol.com. You open your you@aol.com email box, see some spam, then click "This is spam" - but you don't realize that this piece of spam was forwarded to you from your you@yourdomain.com account. All you know is, the spam is gone, and life is good!
However, here is the problem: AOL's spam filter (wrongly) does not mark the originator of the message as the spammer - instead, it marks the last place the e-mail came from as the spammer, and the last place the e-mail came from is YOUR server (yourdomain.com). So now, without realizing it, you have marked yourdomain.com as a source of spam with AOL. But the story doesn't end there ... AOL does not simply block yourdomain.com - they block the entire server that yourdomain.com is on, which means all the other web sites that share your server (maybe hundreds of others) are now blocked by AOL, too. Then all those web site owners who share your server begin to scream at your web host service's tech support guys because they are being blocked by AOL, and your web host service has to beg, plead and cajole at AOL to unblock the server (this is no simple task because AOL is notoriously difficult to deal with).
The result is that web host services have basically just given up and made a rule: "We are not going to allow anyone to forward email to an AOL address anymore."
There are several options you have to solve the problem:
1. Don't use you@yourdomain.com at all - just use your AOL e-mail address for all correspondence.
2. Use web mail to read you@yourdomain.com, and use your AOL browser to read you@aol.com.
3. The most flexible solution of all, but more technically challenging: Setup Outlook (or whatever e-mail software you use) so it reads e-mail from both you@yourdomain.com and you@aol.com.
One e-mail software reading two email boxes - take my word for it - it makes life soooo much easier. But I know that setting up e-mail software can be challenging for some (and I don't think Outlook Express will do this - it has to be the full version of Outlook). So if you have a computer whiz friend or family member who can help set this up for you one time, it would really be worth buying him or her a dinner and a movie to do so.
Of course, there's always a 4th option to solve the problem - maybe the best solution of all:
4. Leave AOL and go with a less problematic ISP .
;-)
posted by Vivian Black at
9:19 AM
8 Comments:
Outlook Express can support multiple POP accounts. Though I don't know if it will connect to AOL which isn't POP based.
Thanks for the info, John. I know for a fact that one can POP to AOL using Outlook. So if Outlook Express allows multiple accounts too, then it should be do-able (that is, reading AOL email via Outlook Express). There's a lot of info about this out on the web because it affects a lot of people.
Suppose you@yourdomain.com is a pseudo mailing list, with forwarding to multiple recipients with multiple ISPs, not a personal mailbox. To solve the AOL problem: set up a procmail recipe which forwards to AOL recipients, rewriting the To: and From: headers so it passes through AOL.
Hi leek - I'm not entirely sure what you mean. According to AOL, they block the connecting IP (if the email is marked as spam). So even if your web host service would allow you to re-write your email headers using .procmailrc, the connecting server would still be yours -- unless, of course, you are assuming the pseudo mailing list exists on a secondary IP through which this e-mail can be relayed. But the audience I am writing for is primarily non-IT professionals: they use AOL as their ISP, they have basic virtual web hosting accounts for their web sites, and they are hosted at regular hosting services like MidPhase or LunarPages (or whoever) ... secondary IPs for doing mail relay is something they don't have. I appreciate your feedback -- please let me know if I'm not getting what you are saying?
How do i simply automatically forward my aol emails to an alternative email address.
Thanx
Oliver
Hi Oliver -- Typically, there is a simple "forward" setting in e-mail software for this ... you may have to look around your AOL e-mail settings a bit to find it (assuming it is there). Sorry I can't give you specifics -- some of my clients use AOL but I do not, so I don't know in detail where all the settings are. I'm sure AOL tech support can help you if you can't find the "forward" setting.
Vivian: I worked with a non-profit organization whose most active member has an AOL email address, and she has this problem you describe. Your advice is generally very good, but since she does not have the skills to change her email setup, I came up with a workaround:
She and I were both supposed to receive email sent to the non-profit.org's email alias, but AOL blocked her from getting it. However, on my end, I used Procmail, and whenever it saw mail directed To: this organizational alias, I told it to "wrap" the email in some kind of attachment (or similar), and then send her the email. That way it looked like it originated from my PC, not from the original server AOL was blocking.
Also, AOL seems to use overly aggressive anti-Phishing measures. If you run a non-profit which accepts PayPal donations, for example, and you want all of the officers to receive notices from PayPal when you get donations, then officers with AOL accounts can't get them, because AOL blocks anything which looks like PayPal unless it comes directly from PayPal to AOL. If it goes through even one "hop" of a forwarding or mailing list system, AOL thinks it's phishing even if there is no spam history with that address or server.
That's the problem my original posting really solved -- allowing her to receive PayPal emails forwarded to her AOL account. If someone in AOL were to mark the organization's mail as spam, it might still get blocked by AOL no matter how it is disguised (short of an encrypted attachment).
But I've asked her to consider non-AOL email alternatives, since this AOL problem has become too great. I recently left her organization, and so now she has to get the emails some other way than my PC fowarding them to her.
Hi leek - Thanks very much for posting a fuller description of your situation. I see now that you were indeed using a secondary IP to relay the messages (your PC being the secondary IP). It's a clever idea, yet as you noted, the "Achilles Heel" is it's dependence on you being the third-party intermediary. In the article above, I was trying to come up with solutions that would allow AOL users to retain their email independence -- i.e., solutions that require no (or only temporary) involvement from outsiders.
Thank you again for sharing your solution, leek! Learning how others (such as yourself) solve shared problems is a great help for all.
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