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?

Comments

several things....

[jeffy124]

are the customers .forward'ing their mail to @rr.com addresses? if so I think there's certainly somehting RR isnt saying.

Also, how can it be determined that an email was .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?

Aside from all that, have you been blacklisted?

You might LOOK like a spammer to RR

[Skapare]

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.

Re:You might LOOK like a spammer to RR

[josepha48]

I have had friends who got blocked by earthlink because they looked like spam. IN one case someone got a virus on the mail server at work and it tried spaming me at home and they blacklisted all email from that email address. So this could be the case.

Alternately it could be RR just being an a**. They should have a way of undoing the blacklist. I'm not sure how do undo that with earthlink and I need to ask them about it cause this has happened to a few people I know.

None of this makes sense to me

[coyote-san]

None of this makes sense to me.

First, if these people have accounts on your system and have .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.

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.