It's widespread... http://www.justanswer.com/email/820em-unable-send-receive-messages-aol-account.html
From general searches, AOL admits there was an issue but claims this was resolved on Monday. There have been a number of replies to those various threads around the web that verify AOL mail has started working for them again. I do not see a lot of threads on the 421 errors mailers would be seeing. I did find this below. http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/nsp/outages/47642?page=last http://blog.hostmysite.com/delays-sending-to-aol-update/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting There are some mailers who claim to be able to mail uneffected. Without knowing more details, it makes it hard to narrow down the work around. Some of those questions would include... does you MTA reside on your ip sourcing server, are the ranges brand new, inboxing, junk boxing (i.e. reputation), are they ARIN/RIPE/LACNIC, and so forth. While it could just be a temp AOL issue (we can hope), it seems the current problem is effecting mainly 'some' mailers but not all. Without more information about the various mailers set up it's hard to pinpoint the problem and possible solution. For my personal AOL mail, I am still seeing problems in both sending and delivery. I do not think they have completely resolved their issues IMHO. However, time will tell. I know that right now it's painful as it's possible you have a new curve ball to deal with if it's not a temp problem. While I have not seen anything I would consider to be greylisting behavior, if that is what's going on here, then you will need to adjust your MTA and mailing techniques to compensate following the new delivery system as laid out above in the various articles. I am sure each MTA might have a different setting or something to accomplish this task if this is what you need to do.
My only question is this - how could it be graylisting? Graylisting assumes you get to the point of attempting delivery of an email (so it knows that you can retry later) - 421 Service Unavail's are thrown on connection. You don't even get to see the banners on the server. :-/ Unless they're doing this literally on the connection aspect...
That I do not know. However, I would need more information from those who claim to be able to be "killing it (AOL) like a champ" before I could narrow it down more as to the root cause. I suspect those who are having luck are smaller mailers who have their MTA on the ip sourcing server (like DA works) versus tunneling in the space back from sourcing boxes to a central MTA. I have been pouring over logs this AM and I do see I can get mail out on certain ip's, however the vast majority have the same issue as listed in the O.P.. I know that it's not only a RIPE issue, only LACNIC or whatever as I have ip's from ARIN/LACNIC/RIPE. I also have some that are brand new pristine clean while others I have had for 4-6 months. The behavior is the same. There are still a lot of questions that need answered if this is a new curve to narrow down what is really going on so that you can plot a solution. I am honestly hoping it's just a short term AOL knee jerk that gets resolved today as what I suspect is the work around would be a nightmare.
I had 4 ranges get the ban hammer from AOL for complaints last week. My other ranges (older) seem to be ok, even with the "outages" this week. Anyone had any luck recovering from this: 554 5.7.1 : (RLY:BL) http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/554rlybl.html
Considering that AOL clean ip space is something like 1 in 7 available ranges on the open market, if that... I would not be so hasty to burn it up. You will find yourself without a chair when the music stops unless you're willing to pay a premium. AOL clean is getting more difficult to find on the whole. We've had other isp/ip brokers consistently hitting us up looking for it because they can't find it.
"has nothing to do with new ips", agree. It looks like it is a way more difficult to warm up ips (AOL) now than a year ago. You sign up a new ranges, start warming them up (veeeery slow) and you get timeouts first and "521 5.2.1 : AOL will not accept delivery of this message". in a month.
This has nothing to do with the OP - you get this when you have a stale creative. This reply from AOL is their way of saying "stop sending this spammy bullshit" - switch up your from/subject/creative and this will go away.
