Slightly OT: How do you deal with domains you forward to who consider you a spammer based in user reports?

Furnish, Trever G TGFurnish at herffjones.com
Mon Apr 30 20:07:51 IST 2007


This probably only applies to folks on the list with large counts of
users, but I appreciate any input.  I also realize it's not directly
related to MailScanner, but I value the thoughts of this list's members
as email administrators much more highly than any other list I know of,
so please forgive me.  If you suggest more appropriate lists, thank you
in advance.
 
Ok, enough pre-amble. :-)
 
This is specificly related to aol.com, but generally the problem is I
forward to about 150 addresses at a given domain (out of the ten
thousand or so I accept mail for) and the relatively small number of
spam I DON'T catch are being reported by those users to their ISP as
spam, causing my outbound server's IP address to be blacklisted by their
ISP.  AOL makes this extremely convenient for their users (so convenient
that quite a few of the messages reported aren't even spam, but are
actually just mail they're too lazy to unscribe from).
 
How do you handle mail that you forward?  As I see it my only options
for dealing with aol are:
    - Don't miss any spam (uh, I wish) so none is forward to aol.com
addresses.
    - Don't forward to outside addresses (definitely the choice I wish I
could implement, but not really an option).
    - Convince aol that even though I frequently forward spam, they
should let me.  (Again, doesn't seem likely to happen.)
 
Anyone have any other suggestions?  I would expect this happens to quite
a few of you with large user counts, if not with aol then with some
other large provider.
 
In my case it's been 500 reported "spam" sent to 150 aol.com addresses
in three weeks, so 3 messages per user per week missed.  I don't yet
have a way to know the total count of messages forwarded for those
users, but I doubt 3.3/week is a very high false-negative rate.  The
problem is just that from aol.com's point of view they're all spam from
me, even though they're actually just being forwarded by me upon request
of their users.
 
--
Trever Furnish, tgfurnish at herffjones.com Herff Jones, Inc. Unix /
Network Administrator
Phone: 317.612.3519
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Unix.


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