@peter, I’m Nick from Easy Internet / FVS
I think there’s a few things that need to be cleared up here with regards to email forwarding.
We do have outbound spam scanning in place, as does any other medium-large web host. If you’re forwarding to Plusnet addresses, then until now, you won’t have been affected by how things have changed in a wider sense with regards to forwarding, as blacklisting etc doesn’t apply, as the mail isn’t being forwarded externally.
What you have to remember is that when you forward email, one server receives it, and then forwards to another server. We can’t forward spam, period, as we’d be instantly blacklisted all over the place, and no-one would be able to receive emails coming from our servers. Due to the incredible volumes of spam these days, this is the number one concern of any email provider, and any hosting company will do whatever they can to prevent it.
As mentioned above, if you’re forwarding a JTN registered domain’s email to a Plusnet address, it goes without saying that Plusnet aren’t going to blacklist JTN’s email server. This isn’t the case when you’re dealing with 2 separate companies. If we just blindly forwarded everything that came in back out to Plusnet, we’d expect them to blacklist us for sending spam pretty quickly, which would then affect *every* customer forwarding to Plusnet. This applies to any email provider.
The war on spam is only getting worse, which is why various technical mechanisms have been implemented in recent years such as DKIM, SPF and so on. The problem with forwarding is that it breaks most of them. There are usually better solutions, for example if you’re forwarding to hotmail and gmail, which the majority of people do, then what we’d recommend is that you have mailbox(es) on our servers, and then setup a POP3 collector at Hotmail of Gmail to pull the email, rather than forward it. All outbound spam scanning is then rendered irrelevant, and it’s far more reliable, and you get the benefit of their anti-spam systems, which lets face it, are the best around. I don’t know if Plusnet offer such a solution.
Excuse the long explanation, I thought it was worth some detail as it’s something all ex JTN customers are going to run into regardless of where you move to. For example, whilst most mail will forward normally with us, we *do* have checks such as ‘does this email sender address actually exist’ and ‘does the email contain a known spam URL’, this may be a new concept if you’ve only ever had a JTN/Plusnet domain/email service.
