Re: Email Forwarding

[Geoffrey Steven Nathan <geoffnathan () WAYNE EDU>]

Thanks for your comments, Joel and Joe. We actually do forward after filtering. What I didn't make clear enough in my 
blog was that the reason that Wayne's mail was tagged as spam was that users forwarding their mail to outsiders such as 
AOL (yes!) and Comcast then marked 'official' Wayne e-mail blasts (say from the bookstore) as spam. After enough of 
those, AOL and Comcast's anti-spam engines tagged Wayne as a spammer. Probably the Wayne folks (and no, we don't know 
who they are) thought they were being funny. 
As for the official 'spam' there is a half-hearted attempt to control the amount of junk mail going out (by collapsing 
it into a single weekly message) but I don't know whether that will help. 

Geoffrey S. Nathan 
Faculty Liaison, C&IT 
and Professor, Linguistics Program 
http://blogs.wayne.edu/proftech/ 
+1 (313) 577-1259 (C&IT) 
+1 (313) 577-8621 (English/Linguistics) 

----- Original Message -----


From: "Joe St Sauver" <joe () OREGON UOREGON EDU> 
Sent: Friday, February 18, 2011 11:04:51 AM 
Subject: Re: Email Forwarding 

Geoffrey mentioned: 

#At Wayne State we do allow forwarding, and this has indeed caused us grief on 
#occasion, but it's unlikely we'll turn it off any time soon. I maintain a blog 
#on internal IT-related things, and suggested, a few months ago, that we forbid 
#forwarding. You can read the comments--they are instructive: 
# 
# http://blogs.wayne.edu/proftech/2010/are-you-part-of-the-problem/ 

Looking at that article and comments, I'm seeing two key themes, I think: 

-- forwarding was causing problems for Wayne State because forwarding 
was happening pre-filtering, and when spam was forwarded to third 
party providers, and then reported by users, it was "charged" against 
Wayne State, even though all you did was dutifully forward the user's 
mail as they'd asked you to do 

-- some users preferred third party accounts because of things like 
excessive amounts of "intra-spam" to which they'd been involuntarily 
subscribed 

We dealt with the first issue in part here at UO by offering users the 
ability to forward AFTER spam filtering had happened (e.g., via 
procmail rather than via a traditional .forward file). That approach 
really knocks forwarded spam down to trivial levels, assuming you have 
an effective filtering solution in place. 

The second issue, intra-spam, is one that each site needs to wrestle 
with themselves, but I think policies that mandate either (a) confirmed 
opt-in lists only, or (b) approval by a designated very senior person 
(for rare involuntary everyone-gets-this-one-whether-they-want-it-or-not 
mailings) can do a lot to eliminate issues with unwanted intra-spam. 

Regards, 

Joe 

Disclaimer: all opinions strictly my own