Post #84855 by Swanky on Tue, Apr 6, 2004 12:02 PM

AOL recently began (without telling users) not taking any email that wasn't from an address in your address book. Lots of stuff going on.

One issue is this. Your email may be [email protected], but the spam filters look at the IP address in the header. Your ISP assigns you one randomly. If you happen to get a spam IP when you fire up the modem, your email gets marked as spam and will be blocked. Your email address may be good, it's you IP address that's marked as evil.

So it will be a continuing problem. Eventually, you'll get a bad IP. You will be seen as a spammer and your email will not go through. Hopefully, a good admin will send you an email telling you why and you can change it.

And here's the other thing. Even if you use Yahoo, or whatever mail, you IP goes into that email and gets it blocked. You may be able to use a friend's computer to email and then it gets sent.

So, the future means we will start having to get return certificates on all emails and making sure they really get sent and received.