The Impending End of Traditional .forward-style Forwarding
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: