The relentless sending of SPAM (unsolicited email) has claimed yet another great feature of the web, the practice of auto forwarding email.

We can no longer allow the forwarding of email from our hosting to large email providers and we've attempted to explain why in this post.

In this example we used AOL as they were one of the first large email providers to start this practice of blocking IP addresses to help control spam back in 2002. But the practice is now used by Yahoo, Hotmail, ATT, Comcast. . . nearly all major email providers.

For a long time now we ve been able to forward email sent to one address, directly on to another email address somewhere else. Well now it seems that this practice is causing some real problems and I will attempt to explain it here.

Someone harvests an email address off the web. They have a piece of software that searches web pages for unencrypted (or otherwise protected) email addresses, and when it finds one, it harvests it and adds it to a database. This is one of the ways that spammers create a list of email addresses to solicit. They also get them from email virus software and other methods.

This person (Spammer), sends off their marketing email to their list of addresses. One of those addresses is jane@dough.com.

jane@dough.com is an email address that has been set up to forward all incoming email directly to Jane s real account over at AOL; jane1-2-3@aol.com. That way she only has one account to check instead of two.

Along comes the SPAM email that was sent to jane@dough.com. In fact on this day Jane is getting a ton of spam email. The spam email forwards right through the mail server (a computer) that hosts Jane's website (www.dough.com), and on to Jane s account at AOL.

Jane sees the SPAM in her 'in-box' and being a good citizen, reports it as SPAM to AOL. In fact, on this day, Jane got a ton of SPAM and reported all of it.

AOL now looks at all that email to see where it came from and to AOL's computers, it appears to have come from the computers hosting Jane's website; as that was the last computer to handle the email before it forwarded it on to AOL. AOL can't look past the last stop before arriving at AOL so now AOL holds the computer that hosts Jane's website responsible for all the spam.

Jane is one of thousands of people using AOL and reporting spam. At some point, AOL gets enough reports of spam coming from the computer that hosts Jane's website that it denies all incoming email from that server. Once AOL does this, it not only blocks all email being forwarded from jane@dough.com, but all email to all of AOL's customer from that server. So it blocks email for potentially hundreds of people.

Jane gets SPAM, reports it, and suddenly a whole bunch of folks can t email their friends at AOL. Thank you Spammer!

Caught in the middle of all of this is the hosting company that hosts Jane's website. Jane is still getting email from other people at AOL, so she doesn't understand why she is no longer getting email forwarded from the company hosting her website. It appears to Jane that AOL is working fine, and that her hosting company is not working correctly, when actually it s the other way around. Her website hosting company was providing her every service she asked for and in a reliable way. AOL on the other hand, is rejecting some of Jane's own email to protect AOL from too much spam traffic.

Worse yet, AOL doesn't notify the owner of the hosting server they have just blocked. So the company that hosts Jane's website doesn't find out that their server has been blocked until all their clients start calling to say that they can't email their friends and co-workers at AOL. It takes the staff at Jane's hosting company a few hours to verify that the server is being blocked by AOL, then it can take a few days to get the block removed.

Last year, one of our clients had several staff members that had their office email forwarded off to accounts at Yahoo. During the week of this organization's major fundraising event of the year, they suddenly had to chance the location of the event and inform over 100 paid guests, and coordinate a lot of people to move the event to a new location. Right in the middle of this Yahoo blocked all incoming (forwarded) email from the company that hosts this organization's website, effectively shutting down about half of the organization's email accounts for about three days. Imagine loosing email with half your staff while managing a crisis; no fun at all.

Currently, the only way to avoid this is to just quit the practice of forwarding email outside of the host account. So we can still forward email from one person in a company to another person in the same company, but not to someone in another company, or to some one's home/personal account email account.

We know that we have a number of our clients that have enjoyed automatically forwarding your work emails to your home account in the past, unfortunately, we can no longer allow this for the reasons explained above.

If you have any questions about this, please contact us and we will be more than happy to answer them.

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