I was looking around to where I should best post this. I guess this is a good a place as any.
I was trying to update my profile here at moodle.org. The system does not like my aol email address which has been in here for a few years. What's the big deal with aol? I really am not a troglodyte. I really do not want to create a gmail account just to satisfy this place.
What's a Luddite to do?
Thanks,
Jeff
Jeff - I am not sure if AOL still has the same policy but back when we started preventing those addresses, the issue was that AOL was blacklisting various Moodle sites. From what I can tell, someone would begin receiving messages from a forum that they may not have realized they were subscribed to. They would tag it as spam to AOL which would block all emails from that IP (i.e. particular Moodle site). As a result, other AOL users on that site would no longer get their emails. Since the blacklisting was not limited to just a particular user it meant that some unknown person (other AOL user) could prevent you from receiving your emails. Hence, it seemed best to avoid the mess and simply block AOL addresses. Sorry for any inconvenience, the intention was to avoid problems and confusion so as to ensure that folks were actually receiving the emails they wanted. If you would like to check with AOL and see if this is still their policy or how they are currently handling such things then the choice to not allow AOL domains could be reviewed. Peace - Anthony
Hi Anthony and others:
Just curious, how could I find out whether our moodle site is being black-listed by AOL right now, should we directly contact with AOL's system administrators? How to get in touch with them? Do they have a protocol or something to remove us from their blacklist?
We have a similar situation here in our college, I think it might be related to this discussion thread:
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=108896
I guess a potential solution is to allow multiple email addresses to be associated with single user account:
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=109235&parent=691672
I also noticed that on this Moodle Doc:
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Student_FAQ, it mentioned that
"Why am I not getting any e-mails and others are?" ==> "Chances are your email address in your profile is either wrong or disabled. It could also be that you are not subscribed to the forums that are generating emails. AOL users may also not receive e-mails if the administrator has banned the use of AOL email addresses."
It's not clear to me about what "administrator" it is referring to. Is it referring to the domain controller for our college, or does it referring to the AOL system administrators? Or someone else? Eventually I hope that Moodle could implement some spam prevention mechanism, so that for cron job bulk email sending out (forum notification emails, etc.), it will be sending out with smaller quantity (instead of sending out everything at once, which I'm assuming that's the case now)... thoughts or comments?
Judy - I'm really not sure what AOLs current policies are or how to deal with the situation if a particular IP gets blacklisted by them. This was an issue that I had read about several years ago and I had just made it policy on my sites not to allow users to have aol domains so unfortunately I've just avoided the issue. It is possible that they have changed their procedures to make them more friendly. If you have an AOL account, I would suggest contacting them directly and asking. If anyone else is more familiar with their current policies and can provide some helpful information that would get greatly appreciate. Peace - Anthony
In reply to Anthony Borrow
Re: Cannot update my profile here: email address is aol
by E. L. Cooper -
If you want to test AOL the simplest way is create an AOL address then create a moodle account with that address then send a message via your moodle to your AOL-moodle doppelganger.