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?
I think people opt to use forwarding instead so their POP3 credentials aren't sent over the Internet.
A well designed ISP will have a mail server that is close to the homes using it, so the credentials are only flying in plain text over "trusted" networks.
However, because email is always sent in plain text (unless user encrypts the mail with a middle-man, or all of his contacts encrypt their mail), most people aren't gaining much in the way of privacy (it's just harder to obtain all of their email at once)
This is precisely why I fetch all of my mail over SSH. It's an excellent idea and I recommend it to everyone.
Second, why are these people having to forward their mail at all? To make life a little easier. If you have a bunch of email accounts, it is nice to have all email .forwarded to one account. Then, you can check all your email at once. Your alternatives will work, but they aren't as convenient for most of the fluff email accounts that many people (myself included) set up.