How could you possibly ruin your Email Delivery and mark your own email IP address as sending spam?
Yes you really can be clicking the “This is Spam” button on yourself. It happens quite easily and you may have already done this yourself.
The problem is that an automated spam filter is simply unable to determine what is spam and what is a forward. Here’s a break down of the problem using Comcast as an example.
You setup an auto forwarder from your domain to your Comcast email account. This also occurs often when you forward email from your work email account.
You are forwarding mail from you@yourdomain.com to you@Comcast.com.
When your customers send emails to you@yourdomain.com the email gets forwarded to you@Comcast.com
One day you receive some spam at you@yourdomain.com, which was auto forwarded directly from you@Comcast.com.
You open your you@Comcast.com mail box and see the spam, so you click to “Mark it as SPAM” and add it to your Comcast spam filter . You have just entered a spam complaint against your own email server! Comcast’s spam filter does not register the originator of the email as the spammer - instead, it registers the last place the email came from as the Spammer and in this case and the last place the email came from is your email server which is the outgoing email server for hosts you@yourdomain.com.
Comcast will then blacklist the entire mail server so that no one can send email to any Comcast email accounts.
They will then contact your host and ask that your domain be deleted.
Until then Comcast will block all email from the outgoing SMTP servers associated with your server (thru reverse DNS).
Solution
What do I need to do you ask?
You need to login to your email admin on your domain and go through your email accounts and take off any forwarding that forwards email to any account or any other ISP.
Also check to make sure your email Alias is not forwarding to any email account or any other ISP.
Although it might be an inconvenience to many, I think this decision is necessary to protect our mail servers from being blacklisted by ISPs in this way.
Verizon, Comcast or AOL certainly do nothing to investigate the source of the spam and would rather shut down a server than take a minute to check it out.
Please note, this does not mean you cannot send emails to Verizon, Comcast, AOL or other ISP based email accounts. This simply means you should not set your email account to auto forward emails. You will still be able to compose your own email to ISP users, and you will be able to forward an email to those users from your mailbox manually.
Tags: avoid spam filters, chris lang, comcast, don't call yourself a spammer, email delivery, email reputation, forward email, spam
