Slashdot Mirror
What's So Bad about e-Mail Forwarding?
westfirst asks: "I run a few small domains on a co-lo server. Many of the customers forward their mail from these domains to their home accounts and a surprisingly large number use Road Runner at home. This weekend, Road Runner started blocking all mail from the co-lo farm. The co-lo manager who runs the block of IP addresses seems to feel that this is 'within Road Runner's rights'. They didn't warn anyone and don't seem to be doing much to get the service going again. One customer tells me that, 'Road Runner doesn't accept forwarded mail. They said they finally caught me.' So what's so bad about forwarded mail? Does Road Runner want everyone to use their email services to get people locked into their accounts? Or is this just a last ditch effort to stop the Spamasaurus devouring the net?" This is confusing to me. If none of the users complained about mail from the co-lo, what right does Road Runner have in blocking legal mail for its users? All e-mail is based on forwarding. You break forwarding, and you break SMTP. It's open-relays that are the problem, not anyone who relays. There is a difference here. This behavior is extremely shady to me. I have no problem with ISPs blocking traffic from a location, but if an ISP has cause to do that, then they should say so. What do you think?
Do you mean like forwarding from routing or like "Fw: Original email title"?
are the customers .forward'ing their mail to @rr.com addresses? if so I think there's certainly somehting RR isnt saying.
.forward'ed? They could check the To/Cc fields for @rr addresses, but then what about mailing lists like bugtraq or someone Bcc'ing you? Are RR customers not permitted to sign up to mailing lists or receive Bcc email?
Also, how can it be determined that an email was
Aside from all that, have you been blacklisted?
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
I'll bet this guy has been blacklisted. There's no way in hell that a network provider like RoadRunner would just disallow forwarded email. As mentioned previously, email is forwarding. Without forwarding, there is no email (in most cases).
---- Please flame below this line ----
You might LOOK like a spammer to RR simply because of the volume of mail arriving from your server to theirs. So much from one machine? That might be spam. I don't know your exact numbers, so maybe this isn't the case at all. I'm just speculating because of so little real information.
There might be a spammer running at the co-lo place, and they blocked it because of that. Many people block whole ISPs just because of hosting a spammer. Now if the spammer was changing IP address, then I can understand that (and the ISP certainly should have been notified). But if the spammer is at a fixed IP address, and especially if their netblock is registered with ARIN, then blocking should be done to that spammer, not the ISP.
And it might simply be a case that RR wants to be the host of not just the customer's mailboxes, but their domains as well (and charge them for it). So they are blocking you because you are helping them bypass RR's "right" to collect the revenue on the mailboxes. I wonder if setting up SPOP3 (POP3 over SSL) is something you could do and something your customers could handle. And I wonder if RR would be clever enough to block that.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
if RR can't trace it back to the originating domain , and some of the mail is unwanted, they're not left with any other options. Try having your mail system leave more details in the header and that might solve the problem.
overall, why don't people just get a pop account for your domain? this forwarding stuff is for the ultra cheap who didn't want to shell out just a few extra bucks for pop service.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
Head over to openrbl.org or osirusoft or Sam Spade and see if the server has been listed in any blacklists. If so, that's probably why your mail has been blocked. If not, contact road runner and find out what's up.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
I am a RR customer, and I have NEVER even activated my RR email account. I have email elsewhere and I access it via IMAP over a SSL connection.
Frankly, I would never want any of my email sitting on a server owned by RR.
-Chris
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
None of this makes sense to me.
.forwarding or a similar mechanism set up, RR isn't blocking mail from you, they're blocking mail from their own users. (Think about it.) These users should be screaming bloody murder. RR may still blow them off, but if a few decide to close their accounts they may suddenly see the light.
First, if these people have accounts on your system and have
Even if RR claims that this somehow violates a vague "no commercial use" clause, IMHO that's when you tell them to close the account immediately because you refuse to deal with morons. It's one thing to say residential service can't get guaranteed uptime or run servers, but deciding who you can get mail from is totally unacceptable.
Second, why are these people having to forward their mail at all? If you are providing MX domain hosting, you should also be providing secure ways of getting that mail. IMAP+SSL is best, but even a shell account and SSH tunnels will work. (Even Windows machines can use that, if there's also a Linux system to act as a proxy.)
I've had @Home/AT&T cable modem service for several years, and I've never used their mail servers. I never will. Even if they block outgoing port 25, I will establish a SSH tunnel to my external web hosting ISP instead of dealing with this nonsense.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
The reason everyone is confused about this story is that it lacks enough information to make judgements about the issue.
Clearly RR has the right to block email to their servers. If you are their customer and don't like it, you can cancel.
Whats unclear is if RR has a *reason* to block this email. Is it possible that the administrator is just ignorant and uninformed? Possible, but not likely. Something had to prompt the guy to get off his butt and take action; even if he believes forwarded mail is harmful in some way, he would still have to find out about it.
The author is going to have to call up RR and get them to explain their actions. My best guess is that spammers were abusing his service, someone complained, so the administrator took action.
Do they really have the right to block email?
I think this is actually a grey area. The mail is not sent to the ISP, it's sent to the customer. The ISP is nothing but an agent acting on behalf of that customer, and can be expected to act with the customer's interest foremost in mind. In fact, the ECPA codifies this relationship, although I don't recall if it explicitly addresses whether an ISP can arbitrarily block mail from some sites.
This doesn't mean that the ISP has to totally roll over. It can limit the size of the customer's message queue, and it can refuse messages so large that their acceptance would cause problems.
RBLs are a grey area, but because of their very real risk of spammers flooding mailboxes it's a defendable practice.
But blocking mail forwarded from another account owned by the customer seems very iffy. It's not in the customer's interest, and it's not necessary to protect the integrity of their own mail servers. So why are they doing it?
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Oh well, it sucks. RoadRunner blocked their netblock. It takes about 3 seconds to set up another Outlook account to retrieve mail from the colo server, which is the way they should've been doing it in the first place. Forwarding email is great if you don't mind changing all 1 billion of your forwards (which is about how many I have) every time you switch "primary" email accounts.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
First, that's a ridiculous strawman argument. Email corresponds to letters, not parcels possibly containing dangerous materials. Once the Post Office accepts a letter for delivery (read: doesn't return it to sender for lack of sufficient postage, illegible address, etc.), they will deliver it to recipient unless it is physically impossible because the address does not exist. (Cyberspace: user doesn't exist.) Ditto packages accepted for delivery which show no indication of containing proscribed materials.
:-), and it is <b>never</b> returned to the sender because the carrier doesn't like anyone named "Simpson" or anyone at all in Springfield.
Every so often some postal carrier doesn't deliver all of his mail. And once this is detected he is fired, prosecuted, and sent to prison.
Is mail sometimes lost or misdirected? Of course. But it is never opened without a warrant (although it may be photographed under strong light
So yeah, let's use the Post Office as an analogy. Some RR sysadmins should be fired and prosecuted!
<hr>
As for the argument in general, have you ever read a synopsis of the ECPA?
Your employer can read your email queue at work because you're acting as an agent of the company - mail sent to your work account is legally sent to your employer, and you are just an agent for your employer.
But your personal email account is YOURS. Your ISP has no right to read your messages other than the absolute minimum required to resolve delivery problems. It's akin to the laws saying that your telco can't listen to your phone calls except for the absolute minimum required to ensure line quality. (There are exceptions in both cases for duly authorized court cases, but that's beside the point here.)
Your ISP does have the right to reject mail based on gross attributes, e.g., restrictions based on size, or (excessive) number of recipients, etc. This is roughly equivalent to the Post Office telling you that it can't accept a postcard written on a 3'x5' sheet of plywood, or a 1" square piece of cardboard. But once you start looking at the message in any detail, it gets very murky.
If it's totally automated and serves a legitimate purpose acceptable to most users, e.g., checking a sender against a RBL, it will probably be permitted. But if it requires human intervention or is "capricious" -- and a limit on the number of 'q's or time the message was received is certainly capricious -- the ISP may find itself in serious legal trouble.
When I step back, this is actually somewhat ironic because after the ECPA was passed a lot of people thought it applied to their workplace e-mail. It doesn't, and a lot of court precedents drove home this point. But now most people think that their personal ISP has the same rights as their employer, and it doesn't.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
You mention open relays, more then likely there was/is an open relay some where on your subnet or in that co-lo farm. So maybe your good old ISP/co-lo hosting company got a message from RR threatening to block their subnet unless they close up all the open relays. I have seen this before, small hosting provider with no idea left all sorts of things open, suffice to say they got blacklisted till they fixed their open relays and broadcast forwarding and other stupid problems. So your provider got this message and ignored it or didn't understand, so you get all your stuff shutdown. I think if that is the case then yes RR is within their rights. But who knows, I don't know how many people you have on your server and the volume of traffic etc etc. Guess getting the story from RR would help /. understand, have you done any research with them?
Maybe people using your forward service have got spammed and reported the abuse to RR. They checked the last hop in the forward path before them and found out it's in your farm.
As happens, they probably saw your address for a lot of spam (and for a lot of legitimate email, but they couldn't know that), and decided you are a spammer.
Try contacting RR and asking them on what grounds you are blocked. Also, check (as suggested earlier) if you are listed as an open relay in any of the spam lists.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
If it doesn't make to you, don't post, you fucking idiot.
I hope it feels good to be a no-nothing slashdot twat.
Your ISP can do anything it wants to, including reading all of your e-mail, deleting all of your e-mail, and never delivering your e-mail. Every clueful ISP has clauses to allow spam filtering and abuse fighting buried in the terms of service that you agreeded to when you subscribed. You also and continue to affirm your agreement of the terms and conditions everytime you make payment. Don't like it? Tough shit, crybaby. Your ONLY recourse is to cancel your account and stop using the service.
I had the same problem with Adelphia, and it wasn't because my net block was blocked, it was because Adelphia's servers were set up to refuse mail from SMTP servers whose addresses didn't resolve to the e-mail addresses' domain names.
When I switched my reverse DNS configuration, Adelphia started accepting my mail again, but Sendmail got all confused and started re-writing e-mail headers, replacing everyone's domain name with the domain name of the machine on which Sendmail was running. So I never got it to work completely.
Ofcourse this would require that bypass the whole RR mailsystem but, hell, if they dont give you the services you want, bypass them!
And if must read that email from public internet, setup your *own* machine to forward that email to your own rr box. Kinda hard to think that they would stop *that*
yush
If I ever forward crap on to my peeps there's a request to clip my name/email from the top of this message if you forward it on to *anybody* please because I hate it when spammers reap my name (and hundreds of others, in most cases) from a poorly-forwarded message. I don't think this has anything to do with Roadrunner's policy, but if *I* ran the joint you might see something like this come into play. :O)"
"clip your headers before forwarding stuff" would be a clause in the contract, along with "You cannot sue the Spam nazi who embargoes certain IP blocks for Any Reason
Yes, it's only 2 cents, but please take it.
Verizon!
they decided one day to block any mail that didnt have your address in the "to" field...
ex: mail sent to lamer@domain.net is forwarded to user@host.org as far as the server is concerned, it isnt there FOR "host.org" but it's there for "domain.net" basically, its a tactic to get you to use your @rr address exclusevely. and not use anything but their service. I personally do not like this tactic, and they do it in the name of spam prevention, when in fact, it does little to prevent spam.
> telnet ask.slashdot.org 80
...at being a big jerk who's stupid and his big ugly face is as dumb as a butt!
Trying 64.28.67.150...
Connected to slashdot.org (64.28.67.150).
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 24 Feb 2002 19:26:11 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.20 (Unix) mod_perl/1.25 mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a
SLASH_LOG_DATA: shtml
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.003000
X-Fry: To Captain Bender! He's the best!
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
Connection closed by foreign host.
apparently, they're using some new Futurama server.
Citizens Against Plate Tectonics
The big mystery is why a bunch of users have not got together and sued a bunch of so-called ISP's for fraud and false advertising.
--rgb
However, private carriers -- UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc. -- are under no obligation to do the same. They can return packages to sender (along with a refund) at their discretion. Packages sent via private carrier are the property of the sender until recieved (and often signed for) by the recipient.
The private carrier analogy is a much better one for ISPs. Provided that they are returning the sent e-mail to the sender (or simply notifying them), ISPs are fully within their rights to reject mail on any basis they see fit. Take it up with your ISP, threaten to leave them, etc., but I don't think they're under any obligation to deliver your e-mail.
Comments welcome,
Shylock
Statistically speaking, there's a 99.998% chance that my IQ is higher than yours. Get over it.
The reason that I and many that I know use forwarding is because of ISPs that decide to change names or like the recent attbi issues.
I actually advocate getting third party accounts for everything.. Mail, Usenet, webspace; and leave the ISP account for access only. That way if anything happens to the ISP connectivity, the other stuff does not get affected....
Since 1997 I have chnaged ISPs 4 times; but still have kept the same email address. Before using forwarded email, I had an email account that where shut down by ISPs abruptly. No. I do not spam.
The first time was when an ISP diconnected my service without notice (www.arn.net) and it was extremely painful to change all the accounts that depend on registrations being sent to email accounts for updates towards the new account.
The second time was when earthlink (www.earthlink.net) disconnected my account for multiple logins {at that time they considered multilink ppp connections as against the AUP as "connecting from two locations" even though their system allows it and its connecting from the SAME location/machine... Now they just send a bill for the second connection} . Luckily I was using a forwarded email account that forwarded to my earthlink account. The "registered accounts" did not need to know the change of the "final destination"; which took less than 10 mins once I got access to the internet.
The last two were also easy to change due to the forwarded account as well.... (I moved; so I had to change ISPs)
So why is RR getting pissed? They may notice that nobody is using the ISP accounts that they are possibly associating advertising potential dollars to. {by spamming their own customers with "newsletters"... something that many ISPS seem to be doing lately}
--
Time is on my side
Cliff,
PLease forward me any information you have on this "block" roadrunner has for you. I'll do some digging, and find the reasl reason, but I can guarantee that RR has NOT stopped all forwarded e-mails from working correctly.
E-mail me, and we'll work through the details...
Thanks,
Ricardo
Meep Meep!
At least in the town that I live, we have only one choice for cable. One choice for cable internet. I, personally, can't get DSL (too far from the switch or somesuch).
So if I were to piss them off, and they shut off my service, then I have no broadband connection. After a couple of years of broadband, I just can't go back!
I wonder if you'll see more angry customers appear when they have an alternative.
I have an open relay. Everyone's blocking me! Waaaah!