Companies that offer email hosting service have seen quite a few changes over the years. Compared to years ago, spam is obviously more of a problem for everyone that uses email. To combat spam, we have employed special technologies on our network, and we have also used on-demand filtering services to pre-filter spam email before it comes into our network. Clients LOVE this service, because we are able to stop over 98% of spam before it gets to our customer’s mailboxes. While filtering spam has been has made email much more enjoyable, there are still other threats that can affect email delivery and spam. The biggest problems are mail-forwarding and catch-alls. In this post, I will explain what these are, and why they are so bad for email hosting providers. These two types of email accounts used to be OK to provide, but we have had to completely eliminate email forwarding over the last year. In speaking with other email hosting companies, I have discovered they have all had to make the same change, or are planning to. Find out why after the jump.
“we are able to stop over 98% of spam before it gets to our customer’s mailboxes “
Why email forwarding is bad
Unfortunately, customers are sometimes blissfully unaware of how they hurt their own email service. Here is how it happens… A new customer calls. Let’s call him “Jim”. Jim purchase a new domain name for his business. Let’s call the domain name “somecompany.com”. Easy enough. Jim can now have an email address that looks like “Jimbo@somecompany.com”. So after we register the domain name for Jim, we also setup a hosting account for Jim’s web site and any email accounts that he wants.
A sample scenario
Jim then asks us “is it possible to have all email that comes into jimbo@somecompany.com to forward to my home email account?”. In the past we would say “sure”, but not any longer. Let’s say that Jim’s home email address is jimbo@comcast.net, or jimbo@verizon.net, or jimbo@att.net, or whatever. After Jim gets his web site live, and his new email address is published online, it will at some point get picked up by a spambot, which puts his email address into a spam directory. Or, an even worse scenario, is if Jim asks “can you have ANY email sent to somecompany.com, and have it forwarded to my home account?”. The second scenario is called a “catch-all”, and is a much worsescenario than simply forwarding a single email address. If a spammer were to use a baby book of names to guess a bunch of addresses, like bob@somecompany.com, carol@somecompany.com, and so on, they could easily send hundreds or thousands of emails to Jim’s new domain name.
Then… other providers block the customer’s server
Let’s assume that Jim uses Comcast for his personal email service. I am not picking on Comcast, this example is true of any large email provider. Comcast wants to block any spam that Jim gets, just like how Delaware.Net wants to fight spam. Since Comcast has a LOT of spam to fight, they have spam-blocking servers that are smart enough to be alerted to large volumes of email that look like spam come from one source. That one source my be your catch-all domain, or that source of spam might be the server that is fowarding your email (and your spam) to your Comcast account. Comcast, Verizon, Yahoo, ATT, AOL, and most large personal email providers have systems like these.
“It’s important to note that ALL hosting companies get their email servers blocked
by other hosting companies from time to time. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens to all of them.”
When these systems see this spam coming in, they try to block it. What do you think they block? They block the IP address of the server that the spam came from - automatically. That means that ALL EMAIL SENT FROM THAT HOSTING SERVER IS NOW BLOCKED BY COMCAST. Including email from other customers on the same server. Not good. Jim’s seemingly simple request to have all of his email forwarded into one account just caused a very serious problem for anyone else that has email accounts on the same server as Jim. Basically, those other customers can’t email anyone that has a Comcast email address. If Comcast blocks an email server, then NO ONE else on that server can send email to Comcast. It’s important to note that ALL hosting companies get their email servers blocked by other hosting companies from time to time. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens to all of them.
Getting blocked for forwarding email is a huge headache for email hosting companies, because they have to (in this example) call Comcast, and ask to be unblocked. This takes time, energy, and money to make happen. It can take 5 minutes, or it could take 2 days. It depends on the systems that the blocking company has in place. Some systems are automated, and some are not.
So what is the answer to this problem? It’s amazingly simple. First, email hosting companies shouldn’t be auto-forwarding at all, since their customers can use one of the many popular email clients (like Outlook), that can check multiple email accounts at once. Outlook can also auto-filter the email to separate folders, giving Jim the separation he needs between his work email and he personal email.
We have finally removed all forwards and catch-alls from all of our email servers, and if someone ever asks to have their email automatically forwarded again, we will just point them to this article.
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