Sending email from IHUG to AOL

[deltasigma]

Is anyone else with an Ihug account having problems reaching people at AOL? This has been the case for the last 3/4 days.

This has been an ongoing issue for most of the year as far as having email to Comcast subscribers rejected from time to time, and now it has spread to AOL.

From my limited understanding, Ihug customers are on dynamic IP addresses, and if email from the range of IP addresses used by Ihug outgoing mailserver is blocked by AOL , comcast, verizon etc in the US then your messages just won't go through. I've spoken to Ihug's 'help' desk about this and they say there is nothing they can do - someone is using their system to send out spam, and they either can't or won't stop it. So all their legitimate customers are affected. Their advice - "use a hotmail/gmail/yahoo address to send your mail". Or, "pay us another $20 a month for a static IP address" (with its increased risk of being hacked).

Am I being unreasonable as a paying customer of Ihug's internet service in expecting to be able to have my email delivered?

[Speedy Gonzales]

Well, if AOL / whoever is blocking emails, there's not much Ihug or any other ISP in NZ can do.

They cant control what the receiving ISP is doing. Over the other side of the world.

Altho I'm using static ips with Xnet. (Thru the router).

Dont know whether youre meant to or not, but thats the only way, I can configure ports. If I use the router.

As the router wont let you configure ports, with dynamic ips.

[deltasigma]

OK ..... what would you do in my position?

[Safari]

This happens to all ISPs from time to time.
iHug will have taken action against the spammer but if AOL are using a black list that iHUG have been placed on there is very little iHug can do about it apart from requesting AOL to not block the messages.

If they don't want to do that the result is numerous complaints to the ISP by upset customers which achieves nothing as if there was some easy way to prevent the messages being blocked the ISP would have already done something about it.

[Speedy Gonzales]

Sign up for a Gmail account, like Ihug said.

Its free.

I had a similar prob with Ihug, in IRC. When I was on dialup.

Sometimes, when I logged into IRC, the server would ban me, coz it said my ip has something to do with a relay spammer.

The only way I could fix it was to disconnect and reconnect, so the ip changed.