As of now the site is restored. But I’m hearing that all the scripts are still down. This means no one can open tickets, sign up for FBLs, apply for whitelisting or check the status of reports. I expect this will be fixed soon, but for now it looks like AOL issues are going to be impossible to resolve.

I checked with some people who have Google hosted domains and they have confirmed that abuse@ and postmaster@ addresses can be set up by creating a group. When you create the group you can then add yourself to the group and get the mail that comes into abuse@ and postmaster@.

Some points worth mentioning.

• Facebook is giving detailed response codes allowing senders to identify technical problems and policy problems. They’re also giving time frames for how long policy problems might last.
• Facebook is requiring some sort of domain authentication to send mail. While they are not outright rejecting unauthenticated mail, they are reserving the right to deliver unauthenticated mail slower than authenticated mail.
• Facebook is not promoting the use of their messaging system for bulk mail. Based on Zuc’s announcement, this shouldn’t come to a surprise to anyone. This also means they’re not providing any resolution services for delivery problems. They’re also not providing a feedback loop.
• Facebook is not accepting mail from dynamic IP addresses, and are using the PBL as one part of that screening.

Outblaze’s conditions are that you are only sending confirmed opt-in email across all of your IP space. They only provide FBL emails to senders on their whitelist.

RoadRunner is currently publishing “early 2009” for when their FBL will go live. Senders who have a current FBL will need to reapply when the new FBL goes live.

That’s mostly there to protect you, by making sure that someone else can’t get feedback loop messages for your domain. And it’s not too difficult to do, as you should already have an abuse@ and postmaster@ alias set up, and have someone reading the abuse@ alias.

But maybe you’re using Google Apps to host your corporate email, and that’s the domain you need to use for your feedback loops. So you go to create abuse and postmaster users, but it won’t let you – you just get the error Username is reserved for email list only. Uhm, what?

Google want to police use of domains hosted on their service, so they automatically set up abuse and postmaster aliases for your domain, and any mail sent to them is handled by Google support staff. You may well be happy with Google snooping on your abuse role account, but you really need to be able to read the mail sent to it yourself too.

So what to do? Well, the way Google set things up they actually create invisible mailing lists for the two role accounts, and subscribe Google Support to the lists. In older versions of Google Apps you could make those mailing lists visible through the user interface by trying to create a new mailing list with the same name, then simply add yourself to the mailing list and be able to read your abuse@ email.

But Google broke that functionality in the latest version of the Google Apps control panel, when they renamed email lists to “groups”. If you try and create a new group with the email address abuse@ your domain you’ll get the error Email already exists in this domain, and no way to make that list visible.

So, what to do?

Well, there’s a workaround for now. If you go to Domain Settings you can select the “Current Version” of the control panel, rather than the “Next Generation” version. That gives you the old version of the control panel, where all this worked. Then you can go to User Accounts, create a new email list delivering to abuse@ and add one of your users to the mailing list. You can then set the control panel back to “Next Generation” and have access to the mailing lists via Service Settings → Email → Email Addresses.

Hopefully Google will fix this bug, but until they do here’s the step-by-step workaround:

1. Go to Domain Settings, select the Current Version of the control panel and hit Save Changes
2. Go to User Accounts and click Create email list
3. Enter “abuse” as the name of the list, and one of your users as the recipient, and press Add recipient
4. Do the same thing again to create your postmaster list
5. Go to Domain Settings, select the Next Generation of the control panel and hit Save Changes
6. Go to Service Settings → Email → Email Addresses and you’ll see the two mailing lists, and you’ll be able to add and remove recipients from those lists

And then you should have working abuse@ and postmaster@ aliases. Before you need to rely on them, test them by sending mail to them from somewhere other than your Google account.