Many people take advantage of “email forwarding” – the ability to easily forward email from your domain onto for example your hotmail or gmail home address.

Sounds a perfectly good thing to do, and what harm can it possible cause?  In actual fact – a LOT of harm, to you and any other people hosted on the same server as you!

Lets say your name is dave, and you have the domain poundshop.com.  You setup an email forwarder for dave@poundshop.com to forward to your dave1296@hotmail.com, and all your email arrives very conveniently for you at Hotmail for you to read, and process in the normal way.

But ANYTHING sent to dave@poundshop.com is forwarded on – including all the spam that you’ve been getting lately.  This causes 2 main problems:

1) Some ISPs (such as Hotmail and AOL) don’t recognise the true source of the spam, seeing it as originating from the last “hop” in the delivery route – ie: your poundshop.com domain, and our server.

2) Some ISPs have spam filters in place based on the volume of incoming email, and if you suddenly get a lot of spam email, or – more likely – a lot of “bounced emails” caused by someone spoofing your dave@poundshop.com address, then there’s the potential for a serious volume of email to all be forwarded onto your chosen destination. 

Both scenarios above have the same result – YOU are seen as the spammer, and as a result – the reputation of your domain, and the entire server (with all the other customers hosted on it) is decreased, leading to increased risk of your email being considered spam, or worst case scenario – being totally blacklisted by an ISP or major blacklist provider.

The situation increases exponentially when you setup “catch-all” email forwarding, when EVERYTHING@poundshop.com is forwarded on.  Imagine a spam attack where the spammer sends literally millions of emails to any_word_or_phrase@poundshop.com – all of which are forwarded on, and all of which result in you “spamming” yourself. 

Our advice – NEVER use catch-all email forwarding (in fact never use catch-all email full stop), and only consider email forwarding of any sort if you 100% really have to.  Personally I cannot see any valid reason for needing to forward email.  Some people say that forwarding to Hotmail is convenient as it allows them to pickup their mail from anywhere.  These people don’t realise we provide a perfectly good webmail system to do just that.  Others say it allows them to collect all their various emails into one handy account, and therefore not login to multiple email boxes – this is fine – but forward them all to an address on your domain – NOT an external one.

Many web hosts are now banning email forwarding, removing the capability all together.  And the result for these hosts is a serious decrease in spam complaints against their servers.  We’re not planning on removing email forwarding just yet, but in the long run, it might be inevitable for anyone running a mailserver to come to the conclusion that forwarding email externally is just too much trouble, and the benefits to everyone by turning it off, far outweigh any benefits of having this so called “feature”.

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Catch-all email may sound like a great way to setup your email – but in practice, it’s almost guaranteed to give you problems.

At first glance – the ability to setup your email to allow everything@yourdomain.com to be received to your inbox sounds great – especially if you’re trying to promote yourself as being bigger than you actually are.  Once setup, you can simply promote sales@ info@ support@ anythingyoulike@ addresses, all handled in exactly the same way by your default email account.

The main problem with catch-all email is spam.  Unfortunately Spam Email isn’t going away – it’s continually on the rise, and the methods spammers use get more elaborate and harder to tackle.  By allowing email to anything@yourdomain, you are inviting a spammer to bombard you with email.  Dictionary attacks (whereby the spammer sends 1000’s of email to randomwords@yourdomain) are common, and with a catch-all email setup – each of spam these emails will be delivered to you. 

The end result is not only a LOT of unnecessary spam email to go through and delete from your inbox, but the potential for your web hosting account to run out of available web-space.  Emails take up space, and it doesn’t take too many spam emails (especially if the mailbox you’re directing them to isn’t regularly checked) to consume 100’s of MB.  Far too often we see “help I’ve run out of webspace” support tickets, caused simply by spam email to a default (catch-all) email account.

The other common occurrence that we see is regarding Spoofed emails.  Again, sad but true – it’s common to have your domain name spoofed by a spammer.  Email spoofingis the practice of changing your name in email so that it looks like the email came from somewhere or someone else.  This isn’t too much of an issue itself (technically, the emails are NOT sent by you, or through your account – and this is easily proved by examining the email headers), but if a spammer sends out a few thousand emails using a from address of random@yourdomain – you can guarantee that most of these emails will bounce – right back to you – because your catch-all accepts email to random@. 

So..  take the time to setup one or more email addresses that you actually use, and make sure you disable catch-all email – otherwise, sit back and enjoy the spam.

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