Comcast blocks email from The Well, citing spam

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: John Levine <johnl () iecc com>
Date: August 31, 2006 7:45:36 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Re: [IP] Comcast blocks email from The Well, citing spam

> The Well (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), one of the oldest (1985)
> virtual communities still on-line, is engaged in a battle with
> Comcast over the cable company's spam filters, notes the Mercurcy
> News. ...

The only thing interesting about this is that the Well is famous enough
that some newspaper wrote about it.

Any mail system that does courtesy forwards for its users runs into
exactly the same problem: a user at foo.com forwards his mail to his
account at bar.com.  Foo's spam filters aren't perfect, so some spam
ends up at the bar.com account, which the user reports to bar.com, who
has no idea what users have asked for what inbound forwards, so it
attributes the spam to foo.com and blocks it.  Some providers add
self-inflicted injuries by not filtering the accounts they forward.

There have been lots of proposed solutions so that bar.com can
recognize incoming mail that its users have asked to have forwarded,
none of which are workable because they are impossible to administer,
trivially spoofed by spammers, or both.

I suspect that the solution to the courtesy forward problem will be to
define it out of existence.  Courtesy forwards made a lot of sense
when mail programs were tightly bound to their local mail systems and
could only fetch mail from one place.  Neither is true any more --
everyone supports IMAP and POP, and all of the popular mail programs
now are easily configured to pick up mail from multiple accounts.  So
if you have mailboxes at both foo.com and bar.com, the right thing to
do is to have your mail program collect mail from both of them.  This
has the added user benefit that it's easy to tell which messages were
sent to which address, and if some of it is spam, you know which
provider to complain to.

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



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