Question:
I tried to sign up for an account or use a contact form on a forum/website hosted by Lupinia, but it said AOL email addresses were disallowed. Why is this?
Solution:
For the last few years, AOL has had one of the most aggressive anti-spam policies of any major ISP or email provider. It's also one of the most failure-prone, and has a very high rate of blocking legitimate email.
Even before we moved Lupinia to its new server, we had issues with their anti-spam system blocking mail from the entire server because of a single spam report, which was usually in error. Their email interfaces make it very easy to mistakenly report a message as spam while deleting it, and many people don't think it makes a difference. However, on AOL, reporting a message as spam automatically blocks the originating server from sending any email into AOL's system for 24 hours, unless that server is a major ISP like Yahoo or Comcast. Needless to say, we're not that big.
Since the point of requiring your email address on the registration form is to make sure the account is owned by a real person, and in case you need to be contacted by the site's staff for some reason, it's important that we be able to reach you at the email address you specify. And, because AOL is so trigger-happy to block entire servers, we can't allow the use of AOL email addresses on any forum or website hosted by Lupinia.
All sites hosted by Lupinia are expected to abide by this policy, but some don't. If you do sign up with an AOL email account, and your forum/website account becomes unusable, it's because your account was generating an excessive number of bounced emails from their system. If this does happen, simply contact the administrator of the site you're trying to access (or, submit a ticket through this system), and you will be asked to provide another email account with a different provider.
We apologize for the inconvenience, but it should be AOL apologizing to us over this. This policy will remain in effect until AOL either goes out of business, or they decide to adjust their policies to be more compatible with private mail servers.
Due to the unified nature of their email system, this policy applies to aim.com and netscape.com email addresses as well as aol.com.
[--- UPDATED: 2/19/2008 3:13:44 PM BY AGENT: Felix Lockhart ---]
Apparently, email addresses at cs.com also pass through AOL's system, so they are also affected by this policy.
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