Last week it appears that AOL put us on their blacklist. That means that any email sent from Gustavus via our default mail server was being rejected by AOL. The reason they are rejecting us is because a number of student machines have been sending out spam. Most likely these machines were infected with one of the recent viruses that allows the computer to then relay spam. And since they were sending that spam using our mail server, now all of us are suffering.
To combat this problem, we have contacted AOL. We now get an email from AOL every time our mail server sends them a message that one of their users considers to be spam. That way we can look at the headers and determin who sent the message and hopefully get them cleaned up.
As of right now we are getting a ton of these feedback messages. They all appear to be from messages sent from infected machines last week. However because these people are just now checking their email and marking the messages as spam, we are remaining on AOL’s blacklist.
As a temporary fix, all email destined for an aol.com email address is being routed through another mail server that is not yet blacklisted. Hopefully that mailserver won’t get blacklisted anytime soon.
Contact Us
Phone: 507-933-6111
Email: helpline@gustavus.edu
Web: https://gustavus.edu/gts
Blog: https://gts.blog.gustavus.edu
Remote Support: https://sos.gac.edu
System Status: https://gustavus.freshstatus.io