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Richard Bland College  Information Technology Services

Problems sending email to AOL accounts?


At this time, RBC ITS staff is working closely with AOL engineers in an attempt to permanently resolve interrmittent issues with sending email to AOL accounts.  Many other higher education institutions have experienced similar difficulties.  Although we have completed all recommended modifications suggested by AOL engineers, the problem continues to repeat itself.  At this time, we have escalated our request with AOL and have successfully resolved the issue - - for now.

As of April 20, 2005 ITS has sent several successful emails to AOL addresses and established a feedback loop for tracking and diagnosis purposes.   At this time, AOL engineers have confirmed that email is being accepted from RBC addresses.  However, since these issues have reappeared in the past, please notify ITS if you experience a failure of a work related email to AOL.  If you receive an error on an email sent to an AOL user, please forward that error to helpdesk@rbc.edu.

April 27, 2005:  ITS has no reports of AOL emails being rejected.  All test emails have been successful.  If you experience any difficulties, please forward a report to helpdesk@rbc.edu

Whenever possible, utilize the RBC email address for students.  ALL ACTIVE/ENROLLED Richard Bland College STUDENTS HAVE RBC EMAIL ACCOUNTS.   Encourage your students to use their RBC email.  Students need to log into their RBC email accounts and delete obsolete or outdated messages.  When the student's inbox exceeds the maximum allowable size, emails will be rejected.

When you must send email to AOL users, please adhere to these AOL recommendations for sending email to their users:

Personalize all your messages. A message coming to several AOL users at a time may be filtered out. 
Do not forward chain letters, mass emailings, jokes, etc to multiple email addresses, including RBC addresses.  Best practice, don't forward chain letters AT ALL!

Watch the contents. Avoid using multiple dollar signs, exclamation points, or words commonly used in spam. Suspicious contents may drive your message directly to junk mail folder.

Not only will your message be dropped into the junk folder, if enough messages from RBC are categorized as SPAM, AOL will block all email from RBC.  So you see, one bad apple can spoil the whole bunch.



You may email your questions and comments to :
Richard Bland College
Information Technology Services
helpdesk@rbc.edu
or
Telephone: 804 863 1667
Thank you

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revised:  27 April 2005

 

 

 

 

 

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Revised: October 19, 2004