[Tfug] Anyone seen AOL email problems starting Wednesday

[Terence Rudkin]

I have not seen AOL in particular but have seen lots issues with smtp
servers of late.    I support Oracle programing languages.  We have an
API that does smtp.  the API is a thin wrap on the command to smtp like
helo(...), rcpt(...).   We have been getting a rash of complaining;
'this stopped working for no reason.'  

One such case the user had coded the string for rcpt as
rcpt( "To : someone at eamil"   )
this was code existing for over a year that stopped working.  The fix
was to code 
rcpt( "To: someone at eamil"   ) ## no space before colon.

There has been lots of these in the last three weeks. 421 errors, and
other errors, from code that did work before.
  
If you do 
  telnet smtpserever 25 
you can work interactively and better see error text then you might from
an email client. 

As to an RFC, it may just be stricter compliance to existing
requirements. 

 
On Fri, 2004-06-11 at 10:12, Choprboy wrote:
> (Sorry if this is a dupe, I've sent a couple of times, but never seen it 
> appear on the list)
> 
> Anybody else having problems sending email to AOL users starting Wednesday
> afternoon? I think I finally fixed a script here so things should go thru 
> again. 
> 
> It appears that they added a new filter to their MX servers that rejects mail 
> as "malformed from address" depending on it's relative location within the 
> email's headers... I spent a while on the phone with one of their postmasters 
> (pretty nice guy, was new though and didn't know SMTP commands or filter 
> details off the top of his head, but had an amusing email address @aol) and 
> finally figured it out the header order dependence an hour or so later after 
> many tests...
> 
> Is anybody aware of an RFC that mandates/suggests the order of email header 
> fields? I've been looking at 822/2822.. but neither seem to have any explicit 
> or implicit rules for ordering, just specification of the actual header 
> format and fields. Is anybody else aware of ISPs that require a certain email 
> header order?
> 
> Adrian
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