Email Forwarding

We have recently discovered a very big downside to our email forwarders that may result in the banning of our servers by other service providers. This is due to the unpreventable amount of spam that is being sent now to our servers and clients. We work very hard to prevent spam, but there are several types of spam we are unable to prevent.

Large companies like AOL and Comcast host a massive amount of email accounts. I'm sure you personally know at least 3 people who use email from AOL, Comcast, Hotmail, or other mass services. These providers can see the same piece of spam hitting hundreds of thousands of their users and determine that indeed the message must be spam. When we receive email, we do not compare the email with every account our clients have. We feel that would be an invasion of privacy. We also have many servers, and each of you has at least one or more domains with us. We do not plan on ever comparing individual emails to see if everyone on the entire server cluster has received it.

If you have ever sent out a mass mailing to AOL customers, Hotmail customers, or even gmail customers, enough of them will get you blacklisted. This is why we require that all mailing lists have the ability for receiving parties to opt out. In the event that you do get blacklisted, we would have proof that no law is being violated and that users have the right to opt out. We encourage you to send mass mailings using the mailing list facilities of cpanel. We may choose to prevent mass SMTP mailings at any time in the future if it becomes a problem, or if a sizable number of our hosted domains become blocked by major mail services.

At this point, we have received many abuse complaints from AOL Time Warner, Yahoo, and Comcast. After careful analysis, we have determined that no user is directly spamming AOL as their automated abuse messages would indicate. However, the forwwarders are responsible for the spam. When you get spam, and you have your email account with us forwarding all of your email blindly over to your AOL box, you are spamming AOL. AOL does not see the originating server that sent that spam, they see our servers. The forward essentially relays the message, and so the originating server information is lost. To AOL, it looks like our servers are sending these messages as original sender.

We have chosen at this time to eliminate the forwarders to AOL to prevent the blocking of legitimate email from our users being sent to AOL members. Unfortunately this is perminant, and not up for discussion. If other large email carriers block us and have a similar issue with blind forwarded spam, we will prevent forwarding to their service as well.

Spam may be preventable, but in some ways it is slowly ruining the internet's biggest function. Email has become the most essential use for the net, and has changed the way we communicate. Unfortunately for us, the low cost and lack of universal modern day security standards has allowed spam to go out of control. We want to make sure that everyone using our service receives the best performance possible. When we have to weigh two negatives such as being blocked vs. forwarders, we have to go with being blocked as worse situation. It is hard to get off of those black lists, but it is very easy to stop blindly forwarding spam.

As of 03/01/2007, any forwarders that are found pointing at AOL will be removed. If you choose to re-add the forwarder, it will be removed if found. We are working to automate the prevention of forwarders to domains that claim that blind forwarded spam is abuse. We will be removing forwarders for now based on abuse reports received by other providers.