Re: Users don't like forwarded spam, was Comcast blocking mail

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: John Levine <johnl () iecc com>
Date: October 14, 2008 7:18:12 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Cc: "David P. Reed" <dpreed () reed com>
Subject: Re: [IP] Users don't like forwarded spam, was Comcast  
blocking mail

> > ...  Wholesale blocking of all mail intended for customers from a
> > particular intermediate distributor, merely because they route it
> > through an external service that adds value.

Actually, they're blocking it because a lot of it is spam.  This is a
problem that every mail forwarder and every mail system encounter; the
only unusual thing here is that Dyndns is whinging about it.  It's yet
another way that spammers have broken the mail for the rest of us.

Traditionally, like 10 or 20 years ago, systems that forwarded mail
passed along everything that showed up for the forwarded address.  But
today, when upwards of 90% of all mail is spam, if you do that, most
of what you're forwarding is spam.  I can tell you from experience,
since I run systems on both ends of forwards (I'm uucp () computer org
among other places) that no matter how clearly you explain to people
that the forwarded spam is stuff they've asked for, they will still
complain about it, and the automated systems that large ISPs have to
use to maintain their spam filters will correctly mark the forwarding
IP as a spam source.

The usual next suggestion is that the forwarder should put some sort
of flag into the mail to mark it as forwarded so don't blame us.  That
doesn't work either since any mark your forwarder can make, spammers
can also make.  Manually maintained lists of known honest forwarders
simply aren't practical at the scale of an ISP like Comcast.  (For
that matter, it's not very practical for my tiny 1000 user mail
system, either.)  I've adjusted my system so that if a user requests
mail be forwarded elsewhere, it doesn't forward stuff that is marked
as spam.  Yeah, you might lose some real mail that way.  It's another
reason that spam stinks.

The real way out of this is to realize that forwarding is a lot less
useful than it used to be.  These days, every popular MUA, including
the big web mail systems, can easily be set up to collect mail from
multiple inboxes so rather than doing forwards with SMTP, you collect
mail with POP or IMAP, and as a free bonus, it's pre-sorted by inbox.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl () iecc com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for  
Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, ex- 
Mayor
"More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly.









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