Some mail servers have advanced protection from the spammers, so a part of “quite legal” letters can be don’t delivered to its recipients. The America On-Line (AOL.COM) has the especially ill fame. Even if you send only a several tens of letters to AOL in a short space of time, there is a chance, that AOL filters will be switched on and your letters will be dropped.  AOL doesn’t inform you that your IP address is locked and the letters from your email doesn’t received anymore. AOL successfully receives all letters and… drop them. Note, that this problems concern only those who send letters by big mailing list and don’t concern those who use ADR only as remailer.

The one from the ways to pass the anti-spam AOL filter is to send letters one by one at 1-2 minutes intervals. For that ADR has the special list with domains to which you want to send letters with delay. This list is called “delay list”. The list is located in DELAY.LST file in the directory with Advanced Direct Remailer and it contains the records like:

Aol.com   180

This record means that the next letter to AOL.COM must be sent waiting 180 seconds (3 minutes) after the previous letter sending. So, the letters to AOL.COM will be sent in one stream at 3 minutes intervals. The letters to the domains, which are not in list, will be sent without delay.

Note, that the delay list is loaded one time when the program run. Rerun the program if you have made changes in the list. The number of domains in the list isn’t limited. Use the “General” tab to switch on or off the delay list. It isn’t used by default.

The delay doesn’t work when a message is sent through ISP, it works only for direct delivery. The delay, if it’s needed, is realized after extraction the addresses of SMTP servers from DNS and before the connection with SMTP server. So ADR puts the letters for nonexistent domain in “Bad” folder without delay.

For example, you switch on the 3 minutes delay for AOL.COM domain and send the letters to addresses 1@AOL.COM, 2@AOL.COM and 3@AOL.COM. The delivery for all letters start at the same time and all they will be marked in “Outbox” by the blue triangle, but one from the letters will be sent immediately and two another will be sent through 3 and 6 minutes correspondingly. You can see the next records in its message logs:

Wait by delay list...

It means that the letters was delayed for a certain time according to the settings in delay list.

The second way to pass the AOL filters is to send letters to AOL through ISP (Internet Server Provider). AOL has the list of trusted addresses from which it receives the mails without any limitations. So the big ISP can send a several letters at one minute to AOL.COM. To always send letters for given domain through ISP, set 0 in delay list as value of delay for this domain. For example:

Aol.com   0

In this case all letters to AOL.COM will be sent through ISP, independently from state of the “Delivery via ISP” switch.

Program overview