So, this is annoying.
On Friday I received two “Delivery Failed” messages for e-mails that were sent out by robohara.com. You may or may not know that on robohara.com you can sign up for e-mail notifications whenever I post a new blog entry. When I looked at the rejections I saw they were both for aol.com subscribers. The e-mail included a handy link to help me resolve the issue, so I clicked it.
I has taken to a page that said robohara.com was an unknown host with an unknown IP address in an unknown range. A WhoIs lookup shows that robohara.com was registered in 2004 (before that, the domain forwarder was welcome.to/theoharas). The IP address comes back as a static Cox Business address, which it is. I’m not really sure what the problem is.
“Click here to check the reputation of your domain” the page prompted, and so I did. Seconds later I got a green light. “You’re one of the good guys,” the page assured me. Great. So why can’t I e-mail any AOL customers?
The next link involved signing up for AOL’s whitelist. A whitelist is a list of people or computers that you trust implicitly. I spent 10 minutes entering, verifying, and re-verifying information for AOL. After I entered the ticket, AOL e-mailed me and had me click on another link, just to make sure I was who I said I was. I did all that. 30 minutes later, I received a rejection notice.
“Sorry! It does not appear that you are the owner of robohara.com.”
The e-mail I sent the message from was the name “robohara” at robohara.com. I also opened the ticket under “Rob O’Hara” and short of offering up my license or SSN, I’m not sure what else they need. The bottom of the e-mail suggests that the e-mail I opened the ticket under may not be the same as the e-mail address listed in the WhoIs database. A quick check revealed that to be correct, and so I opened a second ticket using that same identical e-mail address.
“Sorry! It does not appear that you are the owner of robohara.com.”
I am all about automating processes, but this seems a little ridiculous.
So anyway, sorry AOL users — robohara.com can no longer e-mail you because, after 9 years, AOL has decided I am not who I say I am… or something like that.
This is the 21st century, read the EULA! Nobody actually owns anything. You only have a limited license to the domain name, and the terms of the EULA can be changed at any time with no notification.
I was trying to be funny there, but that’s probably uncomfortably close to the truth now that I think about it.
If somebody is still using AOL you shouldn’t want them on your site anyway.
Kenny had his Crooked Oak e-mailer on AOL for years, and periodically went through getting kicked off or labeled as spam. He grew to hate them, but had no alternative until he got hi-speed internet down in the boonies. Finally he is done with them.