There appears to be a continuing problem with AOL and I notice that a lot of forums ask people to use something other than an AOL email address if they want to join. People trying to register on my forum have now started complaining that they are not receiving the activation email. I'm using phpbb and haven't had this problem before. AOL says it's not their problem (well they would). Everything on my server seems to be OK and everyone else is able to receive the activation email. Has anyone ever solved this problem with AOL? If so, how did you do it?
I had to disable AOL emails this week and a month ago I disabled yahoo mail. Both had an extraordinary amount of unactivated accounts and complaints from people that couldn't get email. I even run SPF record on my server. I am not on any blacklists eiether.
I finally had to turn off email activation because so many yahoo, msn, gmail, hotmail, and AOL accounts were not receiving their activation emails. Either block aol email accounts, disable email activation, or activate them by hand after they have registered. What I did for a little while, I would activate the account by hand, then send the person a private message. That was ok when I only got a couple of new accounts a day. Once you start getting 20+ accounts daily, it starts getting to be a real pain. I finally had to pick the lesser of the 2 evils, and to me that was to disable email activation. But if you are going to do that, you need another means to filter out the spam bots. Such as a better captcha, or 2 test during the register phase.
Have you made sure that your SPF records are valid, your RDNS is setup correctly; and that you have DomainKeys running on the server?
http://www.kitterman.com/spf/validate.html? You can check your SPF record there. Mine passes just fine. I get over 100 per day. I have to prune every few weeks the members that didn't activate. I also prune all zero post members regularly too. Right now...I have 8500 members after a recent prune. Oh and I also made more clear rejection message when someone does use these emails. Most of the forum softwares use something a bit vague and people don't understand why their email is "invalid". I explain with "Current we do not accept emails from @aol or @yahoo. There is a problem with members recieving activation nortices. Please use another email address from a different domain". That type of thing helps. My signups have improved and so has my activations.