We essentially put a stop to users forwarding off our system, especially to
AOL; we still have a couple stragglers, but essentially all clients
understood the situation are now using our service for which it was
intended.... actual mailboxes, not forwarding accounts.
This is probably going to be a tough one for you -- there's no "point of
entry" for you to stop what's happening, other than client education ("don't
use AOL's "this is spam" feature)... client education which you'll have to
totally rely on, all the time, or risk constant blacklisting. The risk was
too much for us, so our policy is to frown upon forwarding off our system
altogether.
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of John Bowering
Sent: Thursday, August 05, 2004 7:59 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [IMail Forum] Forwarding to AOL members - This is spam function
We have about 150 hosts on one of our servers, many of the users for those
hosts are having their email forwarded to other email accounts they had
before becoming our customer (AOL, EarthLink, Yahoo, etc). This has never
been a problem; I just set up an alias for them and be done with it.
I've recently noticed that by mid-day, AOL stops accepting email from that
server with the logs indicating that AOL thinks the server is relaying mail
to their users. After some digging, I set myself up a feedback loop so I
would be notified of any email that comes from this server that their users
think is spam, to my surprise, there were hundreds of complaints a day, but
I was sure there is no way to relay mail through this server.
An example of one of the emails I looked into. A Viagra type email sent to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (a domain I am hosting), which is then forwarded to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Bob gets the email, clicks on "This is Spam" from the AOL
interface; AOL then sends me a notification thinking that I was the one who
sent it. I called the AOL postmaster, got through to the 3rd level of
support before they told me they only look at the IP Address of the
connecting server that delivered the mail to their user, after X complaints
a day (or some calculated ratio), the IP address is blocked until the next
day when it's reset.
After explaining my situation to the support tech, his suggestion was to not
forward email for their clients anymore if I can't stop them from clicking
on "This is spam". My thoughts, this was a very lame answer.
Is anybody else having a problem with this? How do you get around it?
TIA
John Bowering
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