What's So Bad about e-Mail Forwarding? 58
westfirst asks: "I run a few small domains on a co-lo server. Many of the customers forward their mail from these domains to their home accounts and a surprisingly large number use Road Runner at home. This weekend, Road Runner started blocking all mail from the co-lo farm. The co-lo manager who runs the block of IP addresses seems to feel that this is 'within Road Runner's rights'. They didn't warn anyone and don't seem to be doing much to get the service going again. One customer tells me that, 'Road Runner doesn't accept forwarded mail. They said they finally caught me.' So what's so bad about forwarded mail? Does Road Runner want everyone to use their email services to get people locked into their accounts? Or is this just a last ditch effort to stop the Spamasaurus devouring the net?" This is confusing to me. If none of the users complained about mail from the co-lo, what right does Road Runner have in blocking legal mail for its users? All e-mail is based on forwarding. You break forwarding, and you break SMTP. It's open-relays that are the problem, not anyone who relays. There is a difference here. This behavior is extremely shady to me. I have no problem with ISPs blocking traffic from a location, but if an ISP has cause to do that, then they should say so. What do you think?
Re:Forwarding? (Score:1)
Check your facts (Score:2)
Trying 64.28.67.150...
Connected to slashdot.org (64.28.67.150).
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 24 Feb 2002 19:26:11 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.20 (Unix) mod_perl/1.25 mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a
SLASH_LOG_DATA: shtml
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.003000
X-Fry: To Captain Bender! He's the best!
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
Connection closed by foreign host.
apparently, they're using some new Futurama server.
several things.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, how can it be determined that an email was
Aside from all that, have you been blacklisted?
Re:several things.... (Score:2, Informative)
You can kinda tell by how many "Received:" lines there are in the header.
Below is an example that went from source --> forward1 --> forward2 --> final destination (yahoo)
Received: from europa.your-site.com (140.186.45.14) by mta424.mail.yahoo.com with SMTP; 21 Jan 2002 22:57:34 -0800 (PST)
Received: from europa.your-site.com ([127.0.0.1]) by europa.your-site.com ; Tue, 22 Jan 2002 01:57:31 -0500
Received: from mail63.csoft.net ([63.111.22.80]) by europa.your-site.com ; Tue, 22 Jan 2002 01:57:30 -0500
Received: from mail.active.com (64.70.19.233) by mail63.csoft.net with SMTP; 22 Jan 2002 06:57:30 -0000
Probably RBL'd (Score:1, Flamebait)
You might LOOK like a spammer to RR (Score:5, Interesting)
You might LOOK like a spammer to RR simply because of the volume of mail arriving from your server to theirs. So much from one machine? That might be spam. I don't know your exact numbers, so maybe this isn't the case at all. I'm just speculating because of so little real information.
There might be a spammer running at the co-lo place, and they blocked it because of that. Many people block whole ISPs just because of hosting a spammer. Now if the spammer was changing IP address, then I can understand that (and the ISP certainly should have been notified). But if the spammer is at a fixed IP address, and especially if their netblock is registered with ARIN, then blocking should be done to that spammer, not the ISP.
And it might simply be a case that RR wants to be the host of not just the customer's mailboxes, but their domains as well (and charge them for it). So they are blocking you because you are helping them bypass RR's "right" to collect the revenue on the mailboxes. I wonder if setting up SPOP3 (POP3 over SSL) is something you could do and something your customers could handle. And I wonder if RR would be clever enough to block that.
Re:You might LOOK like a spammer to RR (Score:4, Interesting)
Alternately it could be RR just being an a**. They should have a way of undoing the blacklist. I'm not sure how do undo that with earthlink and I need to ask them about it cause this has happened to a few people I know.
Re:You might LOOK like a spammer to RR (Score:1)
AT&T got quite snippy with me about it.
what's left in the header after you forward it? (Score:3, Insightful)
overall, why don't people just get a pop account for your domain? this forwarding stuff is for the ultra cheap who didn't want to shell out just a few extra bucks for pop service.
Re:what's left in the header after you forward it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, I host a few domains for friends/family who have e-mail from @theirdomain.com forwarded to their POP boxes. The average user cannot and will not deal with multiple POP boxes. Their ISP sets them up with an e-mail address, provides all the info they need, and that's what they use. If they want to have an @theirdomain.com address, they do not want it to be a hassle. Hence, I simply set up an alias that forwards mail from their domain to the box they're already using.
It's not about cost (they'd pay if I asked them to), it's about ease of use. You and I may know how to configure a POP mailbox, and how to use multiple mailboxes, but your average surfer does not.
Re:what's left in the header after you forward it? (Score:2, Informative)
Bash Microsoft all anyone wants, but with Outlook Express, for example, it's terribly simple to add additional POP accounts. The problem most people run into is they try and use the smtp server of the same domain they've just added. Many, many ISPs don't allow this and it's really no big deal. It just has to made clear that they enter the smtp/outgoing server for the ISP they've dialed into (or DSL, cable, etc).
Re:what's left in the header after you forward it? (Score:2)
OUTLOOK EXPRESS IS A PIECE OF CRAP
I swear they must try to make it suck to get people to buy the pro version (which my corp makes me use, and I hate the pro version even more.
really though, I find it easier to educate a customer what a pop and smtp server are, once they have that, they walk through the setup without any problems. furthermore, when the ISP mail goes down, all that forwarded mail goes down with it. I've heard too many times, I rely on this account to get my mail from my domain my business relies on it. these people would do better to just deal with the folks who host thier domain if it's so damn important.
GOD I HATE OUTLOOK
Re:what's left in the header after you forward it? (Score:1)
Re:what's left in the header after you forward it? (Score:1)
Has the server been blacklisted? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm the opposite... (Score:2, Informative)
Frankly, I would never want any of my email sitting on a server owned by RR.
-Chris
None of this makes sense to me (Score:4, Interesting)
First, if these people have accounts on your system and have
Even if RR claims that this somehow violates a vague "no commercial use" clause, IMHO that's when you tell them to close the account immediately because you refuse to deal with morons. It's one thing to say residential service can't get guaranteed uptime or run servers, but deciding who you can get mail from is totally unacceptable.
Second, why are these people having to forward their mail at all? If you are providing MX domain hosting, you should also be providing secure ways of getting that mail. IMAP+SSL is best, but even a shell account and SSH tunnels will work. (Even Windows machines can use that, if there's also a Linux system to act as a proxy.)
I've had @Home/AT&T cable modem service for several years, and I've never used their mail servers. I never will. Even if they block outgoing port 25, I will establish a SSH tunnel to my external web hosting ISP instead of dealing with this nonsense.
Re:None of this makes sense to me (Score:2)
So how would I reply? If I'm forwarding TheBoss@MyLittleBusiness.com to DumbBunny@Home.com, then when I reply to a customer they see "DumbBunny" instead of "TheBoss". Great way to run a business from home!
Re:None of this makes sense to me (Score:1)
In any halfway decent email program, you select the account that you wish to send "from" when replying to, or creating new, email.
So, I could choose to send from "TheBoss" or from "DumbBunny" depending on what I want the person on the other end to see.
Re:None of this makes sense to me (Score:2)
Any halfway decent mail program will also let you recieve mail from more than one account at the same time. So I'm with the original poster on this one - forwarding all my mail to one address doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
On the other hand, I still don't understand why somebody would block ".forwarded" mail...
-Mark
They have the right, but do they have the reason? (Score:3, Insightful)
Clearly RR has the right to block email to their servers. If you are their customer and don't like it, you can cancel.
Whats unclear is if RR has a *reason* to block this email. Is it possible that the administrator is just ignorant and uninformed? Possible, but not likely. Something had to prompt the guy to get off his butt and take action; even if he believes forwarded mail is harmful in some way, he would still have to find out about it.
The author is going to have to call up RR and get them to explain their actions. My best guess is that spammers were abusing his service, someone complained, so the administrator took action.
DDo they have that right? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think this is actually a grey area. The mail is not sent to the ISP, it's sent to the customer. The ISP is nothing but an agent acting on behalf of that customer, and can be expected to act with the customer's interest foremost in mind. In fact, the ECPA codifies this relationship, although I don't recall if it explicitly addresses whether an ISP can arbitrarily block mail from some sites.
This doesn't mean that the ISP has to totally roll over. It can limit the size of the customer's message queue, and it can refuse messages so large that their acceptance would cause problems.
RBLs are a grey area, but because of their very real risk of spammers flooding mailboxes it's a defendable practice.
But blocking mail forwarded from another account owned by the customer seems very iffy. It's not in the customer's interest, and it's not necessary to protect the integrity of their own mail servers. So why are they doing it?
Re:DDo they have that right? (Score:1)
They provide a service, at a cost to the customer, very similar to a post office box.
You'd better believe that the post office might not put a parcel it doesn't like in your post office box. Of course, unless the parcel appears to be dangerous, the post office does not use this option.
However, Road Runner can choose to discard mail because there are too many occurences of the letter "q," it's in all caps, or it was received at 7:31 PM.
I think they should feel obligated to disclose to customers what criteria are used to decide which messages make it through. (Obviously they shouldn't give exact info, as spammers would probably love that.)
If customers, don't want Road Runner's filtering, they can get their own POP3 (or POP3/IMAP over SSL, webmail, or whatever -- email is inherently insecure anyway) account
Re:DDo they have that right? (Score:2)
IANAL, but I don't think you're right here. They probably have enough verbiage in their contract to cover this (of course, much of it wouldn't be legally enforceable...), but you might be able to hinge a case on the creation of reasonable expectation that email would not be arbitrarily blocked.
ECPA (Score:2)
Every so often some postal carrier doesn't deliver all of his mail. And once this is detected he is fired, prosecuted, and sent to prison.
Is mail sometimes lost or misdirected? Of course. But it is never opened without a warrant (although it may be photographed under strong light
So yeah, let's use the Post Office as an analogy. Some RR sysadmins should be fired and prosecuted!
<hr>
As for the argument in general, have you ever read a synopsis of the ECPA?
Your employer can read your email queue at work because you're acting as an agent of the company - mail sent to your work account is legally sent to your employer, and you are just an agent for your employer.
But your personal email account is YOURS. Your ISP has no right to read your messages other than the absolute minimum required to resolve delivery problems. It's akin to the laws saying that your telco can't listen to your phone calls except for the absolute minimum required to ensure line quality. (There are exceptions in both cases for duly authorized court cases, but that's beside the point here.)
Your ISP does have the right to reject mail based on gross attributes, e.g., restrictions based on size, or (excessive) number of recipients, etc. This is roughly equivalent to the Post Office telling you that it can't accept a postcard written on a 3'x5' sheet of plywood, or a 1" square piece of cardboard. But once you start looking at the message in any detail, it gets very murky.
If it's totally automated and serves a legitimate purpose acceptable to most users, e.g., checking a sender against a RBL, it will probably be permitted. But if it requires human intervention or is "capricious" -- and a limit on the number of 'q's or time the message was received is certainly capricious -- the ISP may find itself in serious legal trouble.
When I step back, this is actually somewhat ironic because after the ECPA was passed a lot of people thought it applied to their workplace e-mail. It doesn't, and a lot of court precedents drove home this point. But now most people think that their personal ISP has the same rights as their employer, and it doesn't.
Re:ECPA (Score:1)
I still think anyone angry at Road Runner has nothing to do about it except use another mail service (assuming they have no problems with the rest of the ISP). As long as a company discloses that they have filtering going on and rougly what that filtering entails, they're not doing anything wrong.
However, they're NOT disclosing why these messages have been blocked, and while there may not be legal consequences, the PR consequences will be Bad Stuff. Not many customers will like a company that has loose policies regarding disclosure of business practices.
One note I have is that the filtering of electronic messages is not comparable to reading physical letters, unless the filter is very sophisticated.
I'll look into the ECPA. The text I've found so far seems to rely on electronic communications being "intercepted."
Re:They have the right, but do they have the reaso (Score:1)
However, private carriers -- UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc. -- are under no obligation to do the same. They can return packages to sender (along with a refund) at their discretion. Packages sent via private carrier are the property of the sender until recieved (and often signed for) by the recipient.
The private carrier analogy is a much better one for ISPs. Provided that they are returning the sent e-mail to the sender (or simply notifying them), ISPs are fully within their rights to reject mail on any basis they see fit. Take it up with your ISP, threaten to leave them, etc., but I don't think they're under any obligation to deliver your e-mail.
Comments welcome,
Shylock
Teach these people to use pop-3. (Score:2, Redundant)
- A.P.
Re:Teach these people to use pop-3. (Score:2, Offtopic)
A well designed ISP will have a mail server that is close to the homes using it, so the credentials are only flying in plain text over "trusted" networks.
However, because email is always sent in plain text (unless user encrypts the mail with a middle-man, or all of his contacts encrypt their mail), most people aren't gaining much in the way of privacy (it's just harder to obtain all of their email at once)
Re:Teach these people to use pop-3. (Score:1)
Re:Teach these people to use pop-3. (Score:1)
Re:Teach these people to use pop-3. (Score:2, Interesting)
Open Relay? (Score:2, Interesting)
Spam misinterperted? (Score:2)
As happens, they probably saw your address for a lot of spam (and for a lot of legitimate email, but they couldn't know that), and decided you are a spammer.
Try contacting RR and asking them on what grounds you are blocked. Also, check (as suggested earlier) if you are listed as an open relay in any of the spam lists.
Reverse-DNS problem? (Score:1)
When I switched my reverse DNS configuration, Adelphia started accepting my mail again, but Sendmail got all confused and started re-writing e-mail headers, replacing everyone's domain name with the domain name of the machine on which Sendmail was running. So I never got it to work completely.
Stop forwarding and start fetching. (Score:2)
Ofcourse this would require that bypass the whole RR mailsystem but, hell, if they dont give you the services you want, bypass them!
And if must read that email from public internet, setup your *own* machine to forward that email to your own rr box. Kinda hard to think that they would stop *that*
Re:Stop forwarding and start fetching. (Score:1)
What worries me is the "thou shalt not run servers" bit in my usage contract. I figure eventually they will try to screw me out of this, too... for no damn good reason.
a related problem.... (Score:1)
"clip your headers before forwarding stuff" would be a clause in the contract, along with "You cannot sue the Spam nazi who embargoes certain IP blocks for Any Reason
Yes, it's only 2 cents, but please take it.
This look like..... (Score:2, Interesting)
they decided one day to block any mail that didnt have your address in the "to" field...
ex: mail sent to lamer@domain.net is forwarded to user@host.org as far as the server is concerned, it isnt there FOR "host.org" but it's there for "domain.net" basically, its a tactic to get you to use your @rr address exclusevely. and not use anything but their service. I personally do not like this tactic, and they do it in the name of spam prevention, when in fact, it does little to prevent spam.
Re:This look like..... (Score:2)
Re:Surprise, suprise, cable ISP's are fucking jerk (Score:1)
At least in the town that I live, we have only one choice for cable. One choice for cable internet. I, personally, can't get DSL (too far from the switch or somesuch).
So if I were to piss them off, and they shut off my service, then I have no broadband connection. After a couple of years of broadband, I just can't go back!
I wonder if you'll see more angry customers appear when they have an alternative.
Reason for forwarding? ISP Shutdowns (Score:1)
I actually advocate getting third party accounts for everything.. Mail, Usenet, webspace; and leave the ISP account for access only. That way if anything happens to the ISP connectivity, the other stuff does not get affected....
Since 1997 I have chnaged ISPs 4 times; but still have kept the same email address. Before using forwarded email, I had an email account that where shut down by ISPs abruptly. No. I do not spam.
The first time was when an ISP diconnected my service without notice (www.arn.net) and it was extremely painful to change all the accounts that depend on registrations being sent to email accounts for updates towards the new account.
The second time was when earthlink (www.earthlink.net) disconnected my account for multiple logins {at that time they considered multilink ppp connections as against the AUP as "connecting from two locations" even though their system allows it and its connecting from the SAME location/machine... Now they just send a bill for the second connection} . Luckily I was using a forwarded email account that forwarded to my earthlink account. The "registered accounts" did not need to know the change of the "final destination"; which took less than 10 mins once I got access to the internet.
The last two were also easy to change due to the forwarded account as well.... (I moved; so I had to change ISPs)
So why is RR getting pissed? They may notice that nobody is using the ISP accounts that they are possibly associating advertising potential dollars to. {by spamming their own customers with "newsletters"... something that many ISPS seem to be doing lately}
RoadRunner blocking forwarded e-mail? (Score:3, Informative)
PLease forward me any information you have on this "block" roadrunner has for you. I'll do some digging, and find the reasl reason, but I can guarantee that RR has NOT stopped all forwarded e-mails from working correctly.
E-mail me, and we'll work through the details...
Thanks,
Ricardo