.forward foribidden?

March 22, 2009 10:39 AM

Web hosting company tells me that they don't allow me to setup email forwarders to external addresses (So I can make [e-mail] get sent to [e-mail]). Their reason? If any spam comes through the forwarder, they will get blamed and labeled as spammers. True or BS?

I'm moving an organization to a new web host. There are about 25 people who have addresses on the domain, and we previously would simply forward this mail to their primary email account on gmail, hotmail, yahoo, etc.

I've been super-pleased with this web host so far, but on the email forwarder cpanel page, the following note appears:

Warning: Setting your forwarder to external email addresses that aren't hosted by [webhost name removed] can result in your email account being blacklisted. Forward only to email addresses hosted by us.

I emailed them, saying that I was just forwarding and I hope this isn't a problem. They replied, that it was in fact a problem, and that I shouldn't do this as any spam that went through the forwards, would appear to be coming from them and they would get blacklisted.

I'm quite sure that ISPs only look at the origin of the spam, not every server that handes it along they way. If that is correct? Any good references I can send these guys?

(normally i would just say, 'oh well' another crap webhost and go elsewhere. But, other than this problem, i'm really happy with their service.)

posted by kamelhoecker to computers & internet (16 comments total)

That's total BS. Any reasonable host will allow email forwarding. DTMFA.
posted by Aquaman at 10:42 AM on March 22

This isn't an answer, as such, but couldn't you get essentially the same result by using Google Apps for the @yourdomain email, then forwarding from within the gmail interface?
posted by willpie at 10:45 AM on March 22

Yeah, I don't get this. It's not as if the email would appear as spoofed email. Header infor should show it for what it is.

I have all my email *@mydomain all forwarded to a personal address.

I'm happy with my host, they let you do this. The only thing they don't do that I wish they did is allow hosted Ruby projects.

The hosting service should also know this is BS> If they honestly think this is a reasonable stance, an a valid reason, then I would agree with Aquaman. DTMFA.
posted by cjorgensen at 10:47 AM on March 22

So, they keep saying "should" not "can't". If the cpanel interface lets you put in external domains just go ahead with it.

If not, move your e-mail hosting somewhere else. You can keep your website where it is.
posted by odinsdream at 10:49 AM on March 22

An alternate solution would be to set up gmail so that it pulls your mail in through your domain's POP access. This will accomplish what you want (your email -> gmail), while still abiding by your hosting company's rules.
posted by chrisamiller at 10:50 AM on March 22

It's up to the Web host's discretion. Dreamhost, for example, won't allow e-mail forwarding to AOL addresses for this reason -- something I discovered the hard way with a new client -- but that's the only domain it won't allow e-mail forwarding to.
posted by lgandme0717 at 10:58 AM on March 22 [1 favorite]

yay, they relented.

odinsdream: Yeah, it was weird that they were using such soft language. Normally, I would just do it, but I wanted them to say, "it's OK", so they don't suddenly cancel the account one day and say we violated the TOS. (Well, I guess they still could, but at least then I could be righteously pissed off.)

willpie: Google for the domain is an excellent solution (and one we might do in the future). I wanted to avoid it here to keep the migration as simple as possible.

Thanks for the help. (And for teaching me a handy acronymn: DTMFA!)
posted by kamelhoecker at 11:01 AM on March 22

Igandme: That is bizarre. Instead of Dreamhost working with AOL to fix the damn problem, both AOL and Dreamhost punish their own customers.

I get the feeling that shared webhosting is an endangered species. Arbitrary rules, extra charges for things that should be free, and general customer-hostile attitude will drive everyone to run their own virtual servers where system administration is fully automated or outsourced.
posted by kamelhoecker at 11:12 AM on March 22

It is absolutely not BS. When I was working at the University of Washington, the mail admins there were constantly having to track down contact information for mail admins at ISPs large and small to get us off their blacklists, thanks to students forwarding all their mail (including most of their spam). For a period of probably a year, our guys were having to call AOL's guys every few weeks to get them to remember that they'd promised to whitelist our mail relays. Hotmail was a problem for a while too, as I recall.

_Should_ that be happening? No. But is it? You bet.

So while I agree that instead of refusing to let you forward offsite, your ISPs mail admins should be working with the admins of other ISPs they get blacklisted by, that does create a real headache for them.
posted by hades at 12:25 PM on March 22 [1 favorite]

Instead of Dreamhost working with AOL to fix the damn problem, both AOL and Dreamhost punish their own customers.

the problem there isn't dreamhost but aol, which is notoriously bad at responding to requests from anyone. at this point, aol users are punishing themselves.
posted by lia at 12:57 PM on March 22

Yes, hades, the problem does exist.

But if the UW's solution had been to prevent all of their users from forwarding mail to another external address, that would have also been total BS.

That's why they didn't do it, and instead attempted a (successful?) internal solution.
posted by Aquaman at 1:12 PM on March 22

I second the suggestion of using Google Apps and just setting the MX for your domain to point to them. It'll make it that much easier to ditch your web host in the future too.
posted by Good Brain at 3:39 PM on March 22

It depends a lot on the mail server software. We've had issues with one variety where a normal user-initiated forward would bypass all spam filtering, and often lead to spam complaints from several of the large mail destinations.

As a result we have a) asked users on that server to use a rule that forwards the mail after first level spam filtering (which removes the most egregious without-a-doubt stuff) instead of an all-or-nothing forward, and b) begun migrating users of that server to a less brain-dead mail server.

Users who don't want to deal with a) get bumped to the b) solution immediately.

So yeah, the problem exists. But that doesn't excuse them from not having an alternative for the user.
posted by nonliteral at 5:02 PM on March 22

Just a followup from my webhost: There are apparently limits of how much mail the larger servers will receive from smaller providers. So, if there are huge amounts of spam coming through due to forwards, then that eats into the quota and increases the chance that a valid message would get rejected. So, I think everyone's in agreement.

Longer term: The proper solution is to get my own MX server. (Google apps, fastmail, etc.) I've actually setup exim as a simple forwarder on a VPS before, and it's not too painful.
posted by kamelhoecker at 8:21 PM on March 22

I think we've got a missing referent problem, Aquaman. The question I was answering was this:

If any spam comes through the forwarder, they will get blamed and labeled as spammers. True or BS? ... I'm quite sure that ISPs only look at the origin of the spam, not every server that handes it along they way. If that is correct?

I have known it to happen that spam being forwarded can cause the forwarding host to be blacklisted, so the answer to the "True or BS" question is "true". The answer to "is it reasonable for my ISP to prohibit me from forwarding my mail", is, of course, "that's BS". But that was only an implied question, not one that the OP actually asked. (And the answer to the second explicit question there is, "no, that's not necessarily correct, regardless of how sure you are".)

And, as far as I know, their solution hasn't been successful. I'd bet they're still being blacklisted periodically, and having to spend staff resources getting the mail servers unblocked.
posted by hades at 8:31 PM on March 22

LOL my bad.
posted by Aquaman at 8:55 AM on March 23