email forwarding

[kerrydr]

I have set up forwarders for several email accounts on my sites. The mail is forwarding fine, but the email is maintained in the forwarded from accounts. Is there a better way of setting up my email so this will not occur? How should this be handled? examples: orders@mysite.com and name1@ mysite.com being forwarded to name2@mysite.com

Thank you to all the folks on this forum who have helped me this past week. I have just this weekend successfully propagated my primarysite, 6 addons, and 8 parked domains with just about no technical experience. Everyone who answered my queries was professional, helpful, and very patient with my inexperience. This forum was an important part in my choosing Bluehost.

[felgall]

Don't set up an account. Forwarders without an account will just forward the email without saving a copy.

[kerrydr]

Let me see if I understand this correctly.. I do not need to make an email account.. but just the forwarder?

So, anynumberofnames@mydomain.com can be forwarded to myname@mydomain.com just by making a forwarder and skipping email entirely?

Does the same apply for forwarding email to an address at another domain? such as orders@mydomain.com forwarded to myname@bellsouth.net?

[felgall]

Yes it does. Having the forwarder is enough for the email address to be recognised and all emails will be forwarded to where ever they are told to be forwarded to. You only need to set up an account for that address as well if you want the emails to be stored as well as forwarded.

[kerrydr]

Thank you. I understand it, now. At first I was fearful that I'd lose mail, but I've tested the ones I have and they seem to be working. I have a lot more forwards than email accounts... It just didn't seem intuitive at first.

[calculoso]

Please be aware that Spam Assassin won't check any forwarded emails if you don't have an email account created for it. I learned this the hard way.

[2ls2dance]

Does email forwarding work to send a copy of incoming email to other domains like gmail or yahoo?

[felgall]

Yes but if you do forward emails to external addresses you run the risk with all the spam that gets forwarded having the supplier of the receiving email account mis-identifying BlueHost as a spam source and blocking all emails sent from any BlueHost hosted email account on your server - which will get all the other people sharing the server extremely annoyed at you if they find out you were the one responsible.

[mchele]

I read the post from felgall that said

Don't set up an account. Forwarders without an account will just forward the email without saving a copy.

I'm new to the web hosting with bluehost. This response is what I'm looking to do but I don't understand how to accomplish it. Here's what I'm trying to do. My boss originally wanted his email address to be thisisalongname@mydomain.com but then he quickly realized what a pain it was to have such a long name and now he wants it to be shorty@mydomain.com. He no longer wants to retrieve mail from thisisalongname@mydomain.com but instead wants all of those messages to be forwarded to shorty@mydomain.com. And for his contacts to now start emailing him at shorty@mydomain.com. More importantly, I don't want to have to go into thisisalongname@mydomain.com periodically to delete the copies saved there.

Thanks in advance for helping a newbie!

[Early Out]

Set up the forwarder to forward all mail addressed to thisisalongname to shorty. Then go into Email Accounts, and delete the thisisalongname account. That way, there won't be any copies saved anywhere.

[mchele]

Thank you thank you!

[skeezix]

A bit OT, but this is a very useful thread for me.

Is there a way to save this thread for future reading??

[george269]

OK,
I want my email forwarded to an external account and I don't want a copy saved in my inbox.

If I am correct, set up a forwarder without an actual email account. My problem is that I love BoxTrapper. If there is no actual email account, can I filter with BoxTrapper??

Thanks
George

[Early Out]

No. Forwarded messages do not get processed by any of the filters like BoxTrapper. They just get forwarded.

[felgall]

Which is why you should NEVER forward email to an external account since that gets your server labelled as a spam source.

[skeezix]

Which is why you should NEVER forward email to an external account since that gets your server labelled as a spam source.

Whoa! If that's true (and I don't mean to imply it isn't - you know a helluva lot more about these things than I do), doesn't that place BH in jeopardy of being blocked by whatever there is that blocks suspected spam servers?

Trying to understand this whole email spam thing is like trying to dig a hole at the beach - the more one digs the more the hole fills up...

Oh, and I asked earlier - how can I save a copy of this thread (and any other as well)?

[felgall]

Actually it depends on the intelligence of those running the mail server you are forwarding to. If they do things properly they will examine all the headers of a spam email and track back to where it really came from.

There are some though who just look at where the last mail server was that it was forwarded from and will act on that. One possible action would be to just flag all emails coming from that server as spam (I believe some other BlueHost users who connect via a particular ISP have had this happen).

A few years ago I had email forwarders set up for some club members from the club web site and one of them reported spam to their ISP who reported it to the hosting provider who was smart enough to let me know what it was all about rather than just shutting everything down (I did delete the forwarder).

Just recently I replied to a question asked by an AOL user and they hit the "Report Spam" button when they received it which resulted in AOL reporting it to the ISP I was using (the reply was sent via my ISP's mail server rather than BlueHost) and the ISP I was using proved how stupid that they were by shutting down my internet access for several hours and then trying to get me to pay to find out the reason. Had anyone actually bothered to look at the email they'd have seen that there was no way that it could be considered spam. I have since switched ISP.

Whenever you forward emails you run the risk of the forwarder being misidentified by stupid people as a spam source and that can adversely affect not only the person who set up the forwarder but also everyone else sharing the same server.

[Early Out]

If that's true ..., doesn't that place BH in jeopardy of being blocked by whatever there is that blocks suspected spam servers?Exactly - that's what we've been saying, repeatedly. There have been some times when Comcast, for example, was refusing all email from one or more of the BH mail servers, because Comcast was detecting a lot of spam coming from them. We know it wasn't email originating at BH - the 500/hour max on messages prevents that from happening. It was because of forwarded messages, on which there is no limit. That's why no one should be forwarding their BH mail anywhere. Just use an email client to fetch your messages directly from BH.

In fact, if it were up to me, I'd simply disable all email forwarding from BH accounts. There would be a lot of howling and rending of garments, but it would cure the problem immediately.

[Early Out]

Oh, and checking the headers on the messages might sound like a good idea, but since the headers on a lot of spam are forged, I can understand why an ISP wouldn't waste its processing time to check them.

[felgall]

Oh, and checking the headers on the messages might sound like a good idea, but since the headers on a lot of spam are forged, I can understand why an ISP wouldn't waste its processing time to check them.

Yes they can forge headers but the headers added subsequently would be legitimate and it isn't too hard for those who know how to tell where the legitimate headers end and the forged ones start (and hence where the email originated). Of course you shouldn't expect ISPs to go to that amount of trouble trying to work out the origin.

You would expect that they would at least look at the email content in order to confirm that it is at least potentially spam though and they ought to take appropriate action and not do something totally stupid several weeks after one supposedly spam email. That some ISPs do that shows that there are ISPs out there who will close you down at the slightest suggestion of spam. I wonder if they'd do the same to their internet access if you reported an email from them as spam? With the stupidity of some ISPs it doesn't need anything wrong on your part to sometimes have them taking action against you for spamming and so providing them with an excuse to do so by forwarding emails is just about guaranteed to get such a response.

[altidude]

I've been forwarding my BH hosted domain email to a Gmail account for about a year now. I don't even use my ISP for email anymore. Gmail has excellent spam filtering, something I can't say for my ISP.

[felgall]

As long as you do it by changing the MX record to point your email directly at GMail then it is a different type of forwarding to that which causes all the problems.

[calculoso]

In fact, if it were up to me, I'd simply disable all email forwarding from BH accounts. There would be a lot of howling and rending of garments, but it would cure the problem immediately.

I would immediately find a new web host if this policy was put in place. This feature is a tremendous benefit to my volunteer organization. I just set up a email_1@org.com email address for each portfolio in the organization and let the volunteer choose whether they want it forwarded to their home address or if they want to log in and check their email. If this feature wasn't available, I'd have email_1@org.com, joe@hotmail.com, paul@gmail.com, etc and it'd make my org look very mickey mouse and unprofessional.

There is also some misinformation in this thread. I'll use my situation as an example. I have SpamAssassin set up on my webhost. If I just set up an email forward, SpamAssassin is not used to filter the messages. If I setup an email account and forwarding, SpamAssassin does examine the messages before the email is placed in the Email Inbox AND forwarded on elsewhere.

[calculoso]

As long as you do it by changing the MX record to point your email directly at GMail then it is a different type of forwarding to that which causes all the problems.

I'd argue that it is how Bluehost has the forwarding set up that is causing the problems - if they were to allow forwarded emails to be checked by SpamAssassin without having an accompanying email account then the volume of forwarded spam would decrease tremendously.... of course BlueHost cares more about their precious CPU time slices than the amount of spam it forwards, so the reason for their setup is extremely obvious.

[Early Out]

I just set up a email_1@org.com email address for each portfolio in the organization and let the volunteer choose whether they want it forwarded to their home address or if they want to log in and check their email.Why can't the volunteer set up email_1@org.com in Outlook Express or some other email client? Why is it necessary to forward the messages to another account?

[Early Out]

If I setup an email account and forwarding, SpamAssassin does examine the messages before the email is placed in the Email Inbox AND forwarded on elsewhere.That's interesting - I wonder if BoxTrapper works in a similar fashion. I confess I've never experimented with either. I do no filtering, and get almost no spam at all.

[calculoso]

Why can't the volunteer set up email_1@org.com in Outlook Express or some other email client? Why is it necessary to forward the messages to another account?

First, some volunteers barely know how to type, so getting them on email is a challenge in itself (but that's a different discussion). It's easier for me to set this up for them, since I know about computers and such, than having them stumble and screw something up.

Second, I have some volunteers (myself included) that have multiple responsibilities and, as such, multiple email addresses. Checking each and every one is onerous and frustrating - much more so than setting up the forwarding once.

Third, since it is obviously possible to filter these messages for Spam (however difficult Bluehost makes it), I have yet to hear of a valid reason of why to not offer this feature.

[calculoso]

I do no filtering, and get almost no spam at all.

You're lucky. In the last 24 hours, my domain has received 350 spam messages that spam assassin has caught - with luckily only 6 messages making it through my filters - which is extremely low. I've had this upwards of 2000 messages in a 24 hour period.

[Early Out]

Checking each and every one is onerous and frustrating ...Unless you set up your email client to fetch the mail from all of them. Not onerous, not frustrating. Simple and effective.

Setting up an account in an email client can be broken down into fewer than 10 easy-to-follow steps. Anyone who can't follow instructions that simple shouldn't be given any responsibilities of any description.

The other option, of course, is to use Gmail, which lets you set up your own domain email so that it all dumps into Gmail.

(Mind you, I don't for a minute think that BH will ever disable email forwarding. There are too many people who don't understand just how simple it is to handle email without doing any forwarding.)

[felgall]

There is also no possible problem from forwarding mail between email accounts all on the same domain so as to provide each person with the one account.

I can understand why you would want forwarding accounts since then you can have the email addresses for the positions and the actual accounts under the people's names. You must make sure that they never report any of the emails that they receive that way as spam or they are just getting their own organisation shut down if they do since the forwarder is where the email came from. You need to make sure that they are all email experts and understand fully how email works if you are going to forward to external emails. Irf they are email novices it is safer to set up their email accounts on your domain itself and forward internally.

[Early Out]

You must make sure that they never report any of the emails that they receive that way as spam...The problem goes further than that. ISPs like Comcast don't wait for their subscribers to report emails as spam. Their spam filters examine all the incoming mail, and if they see a large volume of what their filters deem to be spam originating from a BH server, they blacklist the BH server. It doesn't require a single report of spam by a single Comcast customer for this to happen.

[calculoso]

You must make sure that they never report any of the emails that they receive that way as spam or they are just getting their own organisation shut down if they do since the forwarder is where the email came from. You need to make sure that they are all email experts and understand fully how email works if you are going to forward to external emails. Irf they are email novices it is safer to set up their email accounts on your domain itself and forward internally.

I disagree entirely with this. If what you say is true, then I guess that Gmail and Yahoo Groups are going to be shut down, since they both allow and promote these features.

If spam is to be tracked properly, they need to find out where it came from originally, not all of the hops that it made along the way. The email forward is just one of these hops... and anyone identifying this as the 'source of spam' is not following the trail properly.

[calculoso]

The problem goes further than that. ISPs like Comcast don't wait for their subscribers to report emails as spam. Their spam filters examine all the incoming mail, and if they see a large volume of what their filters deem to be spam originating from a BH server, they blacklist the BH server. It doesn't require a single report of spam by a single Comcast customer for this to happen.

Ignoring the fact that Comcast is being lazy, if Bluehost was to enable spam filters for all email forwards and not just the ones with email accounts, Bluehost wouldn't be identified as the problem.

[Early Out]

The email forward is just one of these hops... and anyone identifying this as the 'source of spam' is not following the trail properly.As soon as you can convince firms like Comcast and AOL to "do the right thing," let us know. As it stands, you are absolutely correct - right up to the point at which BH's mail servers become useless because they're being blocked by some of the major players. Google Phyrric. ;)

[altidude]

As long as you do it by changing the MX record to point your email directly at GMail then it is a different type of forwarding to that which causes all the problems.

I haven't changed the MX record and I've had no problems at all forwarding mail to Gmail.

[felgall]

I haven't changed the MX record and I've had no problems at all forwarding mail to Gmail.


That means that you are actually forwarding all the spam from an email address on your hosting to Gmail so that Gmail will see all the mail as coming from your account on BlueHost rather than where it really came from. If they decide to reduce the incoming spam to Gmail by blocking known spam sources then your BlueHost account may be blocked. You should do it as a redirect by changing the MX record so that the spam reaches Gmail without showing that it came from your BlueHost email account.

[calculoso]

That means that you are actually forwarding all the spam from an email address on your hosting to Gmail so that Gmail will see all the mail as coming from your account on BlueHost rather than where it really came from. If they decide to reduce the incoming spam to Gmail by blocking known spam sources then your BlueHost account may be blocked. You should do it as a redirect by changing the MX record so that the spam reaches Gmail without showing that it came from your BlueHost email account.

It's a little more complicated than that.

Felgall is suggesting that ALL of your Bluehost mail be forwarded to Gmail. If you only want one or two accounts forwarded to Gmail, do not change your MX record.

Set up spam filtering on your domain and it won't matter how you forward email.

[felgall]

Set up spam filtering on your domain and it won't matter how you forward email.

You can't perform spam filtering on an address that is forwarded. The spam gets forwarded first before it reaches the spam filter. That is why forwarding to external email addresses is not recommended since it will only get your forwarding address identified as a spam source.

You should either download your emails from the original address they are delivered to or redirect ALL the emails so that no spam gets sent through your address by changing the MX record. Forwarders should only be used to set up redirects to other email accounts on the same hosting.

[calculoso]

You can't perform spam filtering on an address that is forwarded. The spam gets forwarded first before it reaches the spam filter.

If you would have read my posts above, you'd know that it IS possible. I have that being done on my accounts right now.

[altidude]

That means that you are actually forwarding all the spam from an email address on your hosting to Gmail so that Gmail will see all the mail as coming from your account on BlueHost rather than where it really came from. If they decide to reduce the incoming spam to Gmail by blocking known spam sources then your BlueHost account may be blocked. You should do it as a redirect by changing the MX record so that the spam reaches Gmail without showing that it came from your BlueHost email account.

Right, I'm forwarding all the mail, including spam intentionally, to Gmail because Gmail's spam filters work better than any I've seen. I do understand what you're saying, though.

I can't change the MX record, or don't think I should, because only my address and the admin addresses are forwarded to gmail. The others are forwarded to specific ISP for the user.

What I'm going to try and see how it works out is remove the forwarder for my main email address and set up an email account on BH for that address. I'll set up my gmail account to pull down the mail from that BH account using POP3 and not leave a copy on the BH server. If that works well I'll then forward the admin email addresses to the same email address that I've set up as an actual email account on BH. That way the forwarding is all internal on BH the server, or at least I think it is.

[felgall]

If Bluehost was to enable spam filters for all email forwards and not just the ones with email accounts, Bluehost wouldn't be identified as the problem.


If you would have read my posts above, you'd know that it IS possible. I have that being done on my accounts right now.

These two statements are condradictory. The second statement says that you are doing something that the first statement says that BlueHost should update their processing to allow since it isn't currently possible. How are you doing it now or did you convince BlueHost to change the configuration between your posts?

[calculoso]

These two statements are condradictory. The second statement says that you are doing something that the first statement says that BlueHost should update their processing to allow since it isn't currently possible. How are you doing it now or did you convince BlueHost to change the configuration between your posts?

Go back further in the thread:



There is also some misinformation in this thread. I'll use my situation as an example. I have SpamAssassin set up on my webhost. If I just set up an email forward, SpamAssassin is not used to filter the messages. If I setup an email account and forwarding, SpamAssassin does examine the messages before the email is placed in the Email Inbox AND forwarded on elsewhere.

It is possible to filter messages for spam before forwarding them on - you just have to set up an email account for that address too. Bluehost should be able to change their settings so this extra email account isn't necessary.

To make it blatantly clear:

No email account configured:
Email received - email forwarded - no spam filtering

Email Account configured:
Email received - spam filtering - email forwarded - email put in Inbox
or (don't know which is is, and it really doesn't matter):
Email received - spam filtering - email put in Inbox - email forwarded

Why the difference?

[felgall]

It is possible to filter messages for spam before forwarding them on - you just have to set up an email account for that address too.

Which means that the emails are saved to that email account where they are filtered and then forwarded to the other email account. The filtering requires an email account to run the filtering on you can't filter the emails without an account with existing spam filtering software so for BlueHost to be able to change it so that it can filter on forwarding someone (eg. you) will have to write a spam filtering program that can filter emails when they are just packets of information being forwarded through the system prior to being reassembled into a complete email at their destination. How you can hope to tell if the current half dozen or so bytes making up the current packet being forwarded belongs to a spam email rather than a legitimate one and how you make sure you filter all the packets for the spam email so as to not let half of it through are a couple of the first problems you will need to solve before starting to write your new spam filter that you intend to give to BlueHost so that they can filter the forwarded emails without needing an account to reassemble the email in first.

It would probably be simpler to set it up with an email account and use a cron job to examine the email account on a regular basis and delete all the emails from it.

[ljcblue]

I've read through this thread and I'm reasonably competent in setting up/dealing with email accounts, forwarding, and consolidating via thunderbird.

The problem is, I run the website for a volunteer organization with people who are barely comfortable checking their email. I need a *simple* way to offer email accounts to about 6 people.

1--The emails need to have a common domain.
2--The people need to be able to access these emails from their own personal email clients
3--The people in these volunteer positions change and I need to be able to easily move the email redirection to whoever is taking over the position

I understand from this thread that forwarding without setting up an actual email will work, albeit in a clumsy manner and may be an invitation for other domains to block the BH domain wholesale.

Two questions:

1--If I set up an actual BH email address and *then* use forwarding, is this still a problem?

I would periodically check the contents of these emails to clean them out, etc.

2--Can I set up forwarding to the volunteer's home email AND also have all 6 email addresses aggregate to say one gmail account that I could monitor? (so, in essence, 2 different redirects per email)

Thank you!

LJCohen

[robm]

I have been looking for a solution to the problem of spam assassin not checking forwarders for a while and this thread has solved my problems.

To answer ljcblue above:

1--If I set up an actual BH email address and *then* use forwarding, is this still a problem?

As far as the answers above and my tests show, this is not a problem. The email is sent to the account where spam assassin checks it and then it is forwarded out of the system.

From my tests, having both account and forwarder does not leave messages in the account so you don't have to log in and delete them later.

Surely this is the way that forwarders should be set up by default then? Or is this why Bluehost doesn't tell us how to use spam assassin for forwarders - because having the account as well as the forwarder would increase CPU by invoking spam assassin?

[calculoso]

From my tests, having both account and forwarder does not leave messages in the account so you don't have to log in and delete them later.


I believe this has to do with a setting in your 'forwarding' email. For example, when you set up a forwarder, there is an advanced setting called "Discard" which probably would delete the messages after forwarding them. Do you know if you enabled this when creating your forwarder?



Surely this is the way that forwarders should be set up by default then? Or is this why Bluehost doesn't tell us how to use spam assassin for forwarders - because having the account as well as the forwarder would increase CPU by invoking spam assassin?

Bluehost has definitely been having problems with SpamAssassin. They've recently done some system-wide SpamAssassin changes (eg: system wide Bayes filter instead of by account) as it was apparently "killing their servers".

Unfortunately for me, it isn't catching near the amount of spam that it used to (from 5 not-caught spam emails a day to 50+). An email string with President Matt suggested using Postini, which I strongly objected to (at the cost of $1 per month per email address - 10 email addresses brings the cost of hosting from $7 to $17 per month. No thanks). I'm working through with Support on how to improve things, but it's much more difficult than it was previously. :mad:

[patchrik]

[QUOTE=calculoso;56480]I believe this has to do with a setting in your 'forwarding' email. For example, when you set up a forwarder, there is an advanced setting called "Discard" which probably would delete the messages after forwarding them. Do you know if you enabled this when creating your forwarder?



This would be great but when I tried it, it didn't forward it at all it just deleted the message. I want to just forward the message without leaving a mess behind.