Are you reporting your own business as a spammer?

Here's a scenario to keep your eye on. Suppose you or your colleagues automatically forward incoming work emails to another email address. Maybe you or they prefer to use Gmail or another webmail service to read email. Or maybe it's just a temporary setup while you're on the road.

Now suppose spam comes to your work address. It gets forwarded automatically to a private webmail account. You see the spam there and report it as such.

Nothing strange going on so far. But wait. That spam came via your workplace's email system. So you just reported that system as a source of spam.

It seems some blacklists can't tell if that source was a real spammer-controlled email sender or just a forwarding service. So those innocent spam reports could put your outgoing email system on one or more of those blacklists.

Ridiculous scenario? Stanford University explains how they get on blacklists through exactly this problem.

Boston College has the same problem. And one web host sees "blacklisted for forwarding messages" as an argument against the use of blacklists.

Something to think about...

More on blacklists | Tags: email marketing, email blacklists, spam

Permalink | May 21, 2007 | 2 comment(s)
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2 Comments:

Very interesting. More interesting that you actually have links to Stanford and Boston College's tech support pages. Now *that's* investigative reporting.
By Ben, on 23 May, 2007

Ah well, I have a key informant who seems to know where to find everything. A Mr. G.O.Ogle.
By Mark Brownlow - Email Marketing Reports, on 23 May, 2007

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