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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?
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
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
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
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?
Try this crazy method - have all your forwarding accounts forward to one permanent forwarding account. That way, you only change one forwarding account when you change your primary email.
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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.