Joseph DeVore's Blog: Bounce Back Management

* AOL's servers will not accept connections from unsecured systems. These include open relays, open proxies, open routers, or any other system that has been determined to be available for unauthorized use.

* AOL's mail servers will not accept connections from systems that use dynamically assigned or residential IP addresses.

* AOL will not deliver e-mail that contains a hex-encoded Universal Resource Locator (URL). (Ex: http://%6d%6e%3f/)

* AOL's mail servers will reject connections from any IP address that does not have reverse DNS (a PTR record).

* AOL may reject connections from servers whose recipient lists consistently generate a higher than 10% bounce failure rate. (i.e. over 10% of a sender's mailing list is destined for users that do not exist on our system)

* AOL may reject connections from senders who are unable to accept at least 90% of the bounce-return messages (mailer-daemon failure/error messages) destined for their systems.

* Complaints submitted by AOL members will be used as a basis for refusing connections from any mail server.

* AOL may provide daily communications to postmaster@domainname and abuse@domainname (or @IP.address if no reverse-DNS or PTR records are present) to senders who may be in violation of AOL's guidelines.

* America Online, Inc. ("AOL") does not authorize the use of its proprietary computers and computer network ("the AOL Network") to accept, transmit or distribute unsolicited bulk e-mail sent from the Internet to AOL members. Details on AOL's Unsolicited Bulk E-mail policy can be found at http://www.aol.com/info/bulkemail.adp

The first note in this series is in regards to UTF-7 character encoding and how JavaMail has a problem processing the NDR.

"UTF-7" (a.k.a. "UTF7", "UNICODE-1-1-UTF-7", "csUnicode11UTF7", "UNICODE-2-0-UTF-7") The 7-bit Unicode character encoding defined in RFC 2152. The O-set characters are encoded as a shift sequence. Both O-set flavors (direct and shifted) are decoded.

In order to process NDR messages, you must install this JAR file in cfusionmx\lib: http://www.freeutils.net/source/jcharset/

Additional info related to this topic: http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=7&threadid=767099&enterthread=y