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If I setup an MTA to merely forward incoming email without attempting to filter spam will my MTA be 'blacklisted' along with the server at the spam's origin?
August 28, 2008 1:46 PM   RSS feed for this thread Subscribe

I manage over 150 (and growing) domains. I would like to provide email addresses to users at those domains. Rather than provide Pop/IMAP access, I would prefer to forward email to the users' Yahoo/Gmail/etc email addresses. If I setup an MTA to merely forward incoming email without attempting to filter spam will my MTA be 'blacklisted' along with the server at the spam's origin?
posted by anonymous to computers & internet (6 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
Yes. Mail forwarding like that will lead to blacklisting because blacklists are stupid. Handling mail forwarding like that is a major pain in the ass.
posted by Geckwoistmeinauto at 2:31 PM on August 28, 2008


Yes. I had a huge problem with AOL because my brother decided he wanted all email sent to his account on my machine to forward to his AOL account.

The problem still exists today, and irritates the crap out of me.

If you can set it up to spam FIRST and only forward "ham", you would be OK.. but then the user would have to check his "quarantine" on your server...
posted by twiggy at 2:32 PM on August 28, 2008


Google has ISP options for Google Apps for your Domain. You might consider looking into that. You wouldn't have to do any forwarding, or have any infrastructure of your own for the most part.
posted by me & my monkey at 3:56 PM on August 28, 2008


Another yes, found this out the hard way for a domain I was hosting that wanted me to forward their mail.
posted by Brian Puccio at 4:27 PM on August 28, 2008


Yes, you'd be providing an "open relay".

Why not provide your customers with directions to set up various "pull" features of their Favourite Mail Provider so that they can import mail from your POP/IMAP service to Gmail/Yahoo/whatever?
posted by 5MeoCMP at 4:36 PM on August 28, 2008


You also want to be careful to guard against "backscatter spam" -- that is, being careful not to send bounce messages back to any random Return addresses.

I think there's an FAQ on the SpamCop forum about best practices with forwarding.
posted by meta_eli at 8:53 PM on August 28, 2008


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