Can't use my AOL email? [Archive]

webmaster

01-24-2006, 04:23 PM

Dear Dorothea:

I'm sorry that it took me a couple of days to get back to you in response to your question about using your AOL account. But I've been working on adding new capabilities to the Steppin Out site for the past several days and needed to finish those changes before the next issue of Steppin Out went to bed.

The reason you can't register on our site using an AOL email address is very simple. For over two years now, AOL has blocked ALL inbound emails sent from the hosting company that hosts our dedicated web server. This dispute has nothing to do with us or our web sites per se except that we're caught in the middle. It involves some sort of a corporate dispute between these two giant hosting companies over some spam mailings to AOL users that occurred from our hosting company's servers several years ago. :rolleyes:

Unfortunately, our forums software relies on the ability to send email to you to confirm your registration, for features it provides to you as a user, and for messages we may need to send to all Steppin Out registered users from time to time. As you might imagine if we're unable to reliably send you email, we're obviously not going to be successful at getting messages through to your AOL address when we need to. That's the reason we blocked the use of AOL addresses when we were building the Steppin Out site. You can register using any other address except AOL. So a yahoo or hotmail address would work just fine. But for the time being, at least, AOL addresses are "off limits". By the way, after receiving your email I did remove the restriction of registering with and AOL address because I believe we may be close to a solution on this. But if you register using your AOL email address, please be aware that you will NOT be able to receive any emails from our website at all... even such emails as "Registration Validation" and "Reset Password" will not make it to you. :(

The good news is that there is a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel on this issue. I discovered several weeks ago that our webhosting provider has now come up with a way to get emails through to AOL users from the webmail software that resides on our server. What we're trying to figure out now is how we can hook our website's software into that same "email pipe" to let us send email through that new secure AOL mail pathway. I've been working on this with our webhosting company's tech support folks for some time now. Hopefully, we will have an answer soon. ;)

Thanks for asking!

Best Professional Regards,
Greg Platt
WebMaster, Steppin Out New Mexico
Web Witchcraft Publishing