Agressive SPAM filters

Now, here's an interesting thing.

I got a Donor Manager bug report from a user. I hit reply and sent a note back to the user.

Boom. I get an error message from AOL saying that I was sending unsolicited bulk email and the message was rejected.

The interesting thing is, I was sending the mail through my mail.donormanager.com mail server to a user @sil.org. The only place AOL was involved was that I was using an AOL connection to get on the internet.

Now, where is AOL involved in this, I'd like to know. As near as I can tell, the message never passed through an AOL e-mail server.

And, I asked the recipient if he was using AOL (eg: was his @sil.org account being forwarded to an AOL account). The answer was no.

Go figure.

So, I sent re-sent the same message. It bounced again.

I wrote a new message (with essentially the same content) ... it passed through.

I got on tech support chat with AOL. The guy who tried to help me was very nice, but he was stumped as well. After he sent me a canned reply about the evils of trying to use AOL to send spam (I had made it very clear in my previous chat entry that this was a single message, typed personally by me, send to just one person), I realized that while he was polite, he was clueless.

select * from AOLTechSupport where clue > 0
returns 0 rows