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You are here: Home>> Guidelines>>Requirements for Sending Email to AOL
This page contains AOL Postmaster's technical and policy requirements for email senders. Failure to meet these requirements will result in reduced delivery of your mail. We also have a best practices document for email senders.
Technical Requirements: - All email must be RFC compliant. (Refer to RFC 2821 & RFC 2822)
- All email servers connecting to AOL's mail servers must have valid, meaningful, non-generic reverse DNS records.
Examples: - Good RDNS: mail.domain.com
- Generic RDNS: 1.2.3.3.domain.isp.com
- All e-mail servers connecting to AOL's mail servers must be secured to prevent unauthorized or anonymous use. Ensure your mail server is not an open proxy or an open relay.
- Ensure all forms on your web server are secure. If you use formmail scripts, ensure they cannot be used to send spam.
- Direct connections from dynamically assigned/residential customer IP addresses to AOL's mail servers may not be accepted.
- Organizations may not hard code AOL's mx records into their configuration files.
Policy Requirements: - Any email sent to AOL members must conform to AOL Legal's Community Guidelines (http://legal.web.aol.com/aol/aolpol/comguide.html)
- All commercial email must be CAN-SPAM compliant.
- Email senders must not do anything that tries to hide, forge or misrepresent the sender of the e-mail and sending site o f the e-mail.
- Opt-in information, including how an email address was obtained, the date/time of opt-in, and the IP address the user opted in from must be made available on request.
- All subscription based e-mail must have valid, non-electronic, contact information for the sending organization in the text of each e-mail including phone number and a physical mailing address.
- Bulk mailings should contain simple and obvious unsubscribe mechanisms. We recommend that this be in the form of a working link to a one-click unsubscribe system.
- Persons sending subscription-based mail must remove any email address which generates any of the following error codes:
- 550 "username" Is Not Accepting Mail From This Sender
- 550 Mailbox not found
- 550 We would love to have gotten this email to example_user@aim.com. But, your recipient never logged onto their free AIM Mail account. Please contact them and let them know that they're missing out on all the super features offered by AIM Mail. And by the way, they're also missing out on your email.
A complete list of AOL error codes can be found here. - Member complaints, bounces, invalid recipients, failure to accept bounces, and spam trap hits all contribute to a sender's reputation. Any sender with a poor reputation may be automatically removed from the AOL whitelist. A pattern of such abuses common to a single organization may result in the revocation of whitelist status for some or all of that organization's IP Addresses. For tips on improving your reputation, check out our best practices document for email senders.
- AOL may remove an IP from the whitelist without notice for violation of any of these technical or policy requirements.
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