The Impending End of Traditional .forward-style Forwarding

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The Impending End of Traditional .forward-style Forwarding

12/1/2004

By Joe St Sauver

J'e's back, with a finely detailed scenario of one of the many ways in which getting clear communications to our constituents, especially students, is becoming more complicated. It's an issue of utmost importance to institutional missions but it's not clear that anyone but techies and a few exceptionally alert marketing people understand what's happening. Enjoy J'e's piece!

Way back when, at the dawn of Internet time, spam was not a scourge upon the land. Hard to believe, but yes, it is true: There *was* once an online world without spam. The rules then were "be conservative in what you send, and liberal in what you accept," and "deliver or return, never discard any message," and systems acting as open relays were widespread and convenient, rather than a conduit for abuse and a cause for summary blacklisting.

Another dying artifact of those earlier, simpler, times is (or perhaps I should say "was") e-mail forwarding using the traditional .forward file. For those of you who've grown up on Windows, and who may never have seen a Unix percent-sign shell prompt in your life, let me explain briefly how a .forward file works--the process is really quite simple.

In a nutshell, by creating a file with the special name ".forward" in your default directory on a Unix system, the system would begin automatically forwarding any new mail it received for you to whatever address you listed in that file. Boop, in comes mail addressed to your old address; boop, out g'es that same message again, automatically forwarded on to your new address.

In the old days, this was no big deal--who cared where your e-mail came from? These days, however, how your mail gets routed is a very important issue for one simple reason: deliverability.

"Deliverability" is a term that has been coined to capture the problem that sites increasingly face trying to get legitimate mail through anti-spam measures. Trying to send mail that includes bad keywords? You may have "deliverability issues" at sites that use content-based filters. Had an accidental configuration problem that resulted in spammers exploiting your system for a while? You may be listed on one or more DNSBLs, and have "deliverability problems" as a result.

Deliverability is particularly closely tied to reputation. Every piece of mail that gets sent from your campus, whether created by a local user or forwarded by that user to another account using a dot forward forwarding entry, "counts" against your reputation at a growing number of providers. As far as they can tell (and remember, this is all automated because of the hundreds of millions of messages that are involved), when you hand their mail servers a message, "you" sent them those messages, even if all you did was innocently and dutifully forward the mail on behalf of one of your users, as instructed by that user's .forward file.

As part of that process, are you forwarding along spam as well as good mail? If so, guess what, you'll get a "bad reputation" and you may then begin to have "deliverability concerns." All of that, as far as it g'es, is pretty comprehensible/routine. However, at a growing number of colleges and universities, the following more *subtle* scenario has begun to occur: