Forwarding Email

We have many clients who forward their domain emails to off-network accounts, such as gmail, yahoo, hotmail, etc.

It's important to realize that sometimes your emails won't get to their forwarded destination. Sure, most of the time there won't be a problem but whenever you involve more than one email provider it increases the odds that something can go wrong. I'm sure you've heard the saying "too many cooks in the kitchen" and that applies here.

Below are a list of incidents that can interfere with your forwarded emails...

1) Network outages. If there's a bad router somewhere along a network path it often causes a timeout on any request coming through. Such outages are completely random and usually fixed within minutes to hours. However, if you happened to have an important email forwarding at that time you may not see it on the other side.

2) Network blocks. Sometimes a network will setup blocks on certain servers because it believes there is spam originating from that server. For example, if domain.com is forwarding emails to a Comcast address, all the legit emails are being sent over as well as the junk mail. Comcast thinks domain.com is spamming it's email account, when those spam emails are actually just being forwarded from domain.com to their network. This misunderstanding will cause Comcast to block any emails sent from the server hosting domain.com. How does this affect you? If your account is also hosted on the same server as domain.com you will be blocked from sending emails to Comcast. Even if you have a unique IP address it doesn't matter....it all comes back to the same server.

3) Spam filters. Anytime you forward an email to another provider you're at the mercy of their email filters. Spam filtering is variable and always in response to the type of spam that is common at that time. Emails that may have passed through a filter two weeks ago may not make it through today. With the rules of filtering always changing, be mindful that your forwarded emails may be filtered out from time to time.

So what can be done to maximize the retrieval of your emails?

1) Keep a local copy of your email. If you have an address at domain.com and are forwarding emails to a gmail account, be sure to keep a local copy of your email at your domain. This way if there's a problem with your forwarding you can still view your emails by checking your domain account.

2) Keep an eye on your quarantine list. If you have a spam filter, always keep an eye on the emails it's filtering out. Any good spam filtering system will provide this option. It's important to check this daily. No spam filter is 100% accurate so it's important to check daily for that small percentage of legit emails that might be filtered.

3) Check your email account space often. If your email accont runs out of space, no new email will be received. It's always a good idea to make sure you have enough space.

I am working on the network block issue by ensuring that all email accounts on our servers have EAS (Easy Anti-Spam) enabled. This will reduce the amount of spam leaving our servers by way of forwarding.

If you have any questions about how to keep a local copy of your email or how to view space, please let me know.

Anthony
Web Feat
http://www.WebFeatWorks.com

Support: http://www.WebFeatSupport.com