Anyone else completely fed up with AOL email?

[misterbill99]

I switched to AOL email several weeks (months?) ago. Everything seemed fine at first. But in the past few weeks, I started seeing several hour delays in mail being delivered (I use Mailwasher to read my mail and it shows both the sent and received times for anyone wondering how I know).  Then, I got letters in snail mail from several financial institutions telling me that they could not email me notice of my quarterly statements at the beginning of July so they were turning off electronic delivery.  This was the first I knew about mail not being delivered, but then this week a friend forwarded me an email bounce they they received when trying to email me at my private domain that was gettingforwarded to my Verizon.net address.

I contacted AOL "support" via Twitter DM and they told me that they had identified my problem and sent it to the appropriate group to be fixed but I have not heard from them for several days. I got tired of 12 hour delayed emails so i started to route my private domain email to Gmail instead but when the delays seem to have been resolved, I started forwarding the Gmail to Verizon (which I had been doing previously for mail sent there but had turned off). When I turned forwarding back on, I did not have it delete the Gmail email after forwarding (which I had been doing), and I started seeing yet another problem. AOL is rejecting several pieces of perfectly valid email that are being forwarded by Gmail. The latest is "5.2.1 : AOL will not accept delivery of this message" for email from the popular Slickdeals site. I've also gotten "521 5.2.1 : (DMARC:F2) This message failed DMARC Evaluation because neither DKIM or SPF aligned with the policy provided by the From domain." for email from Fitbit.com. Maybe this is what caused the financial institutions to not be able to email me.

Oh yeah, and when I had the spam filtering turned on, I was routinely getting DOZENS of pieces of email mistakenly flagged as spam that I had to retrieve out of the spam folder (most were addressed to my private domain). It wasnt doing that originally but something changed. I eventually turned that feature off (amusingly, the few pieces of spam that I did get weren't caught).

I thought that AOL offered a quality email service (stop laughing). I had very few problems with Verizon email servers. Am I going to have to give up on the AOL servers and use something else? Apparently the 5.2.1 error bounced emails is a well known problem, so I may really have no choice but to stop using them.