DMARC and a legacy email account on AIM (AOL).com

May 12, 2014 2:00 PM

I have had an AIM.com email account (That's AOL Instant Messenger -AIM, for all you young folks) since 1999. It is brain dead simple email service, which is why I have kept it so long. It doesn't try to reorder your messages or roll them up into streams. I know, I am a Luddite. But in the past two weeks AOL has reset its DMARC policies to do with alias spoofing and now all my email is being rejected by major carriers like Gmail. Reason being, my address is [e-mail], and the outgoing server is at AOL.com. I have poked around the site for awhile, but can't find any obvious fixes. I wrote to AOL.com, but have not received a reply yet. Has anyone else faced and fixed this problem?
posted by eaglehound to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

is the aim.com address really secretly also an aol.com address? I vaguely remember that as being the case...
posted by Mad_Carew at 2:16 PM on May 12, 2014

fwiw, aim.com's spf record includes aol.com's spf record. This means that any ip address authorized to send from aol.com should also be authorized to send from aim.com.

How do you know that your mail is being rejected (rather than sent to spam, or accepted and silently dropped)?
posted by Radiophonic Oddity at 3:19 PM on May 12, 2014

Response by poster: I know my mail is rejected because I get return mail that says:
A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

[e-mail]

SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:
host alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com [173.194.66.27]:
550-5.7.1 Unauthenticated email from aim.com is not accepted due to domain's
550-5.7.1 DMARC policy. Please contact administrator of aim.com domain if
this
550-5.7.1 was a legitimate mail. Please visit
550-5.7.1 http://support.google.com/mail/answer/2451690 to learn about DMARC
550 5.7.1 initiative. r15si3003354wib.1 - gsmtp
posted by eaglehound at 7:14 PM on May 12, 2014