Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo mail services do not differentiate between the sending server and the server that forwarded a spam message, and as such, they commonly blacklist legitimate domains for forwarding spam.

Between 25% and 30% of all emails sent daily from our mail servers are sent to Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo mail services, making it very important that mail delivery to this providers is not blocked.

Some website owners have 'contact us' and 'signup' pages on their websites that send an authenticated email from their website to a local mailbox which then forwards the emails from the local mailbox to another provider. This is increasingly being targeted by spammers. Often spammers use the 'contact us' page to send the website owner spam, which they in turn mark as spam when the email is received. If the email is forwarded to another provider then marking the email as spam tells the mail provider that our mail servers are sending spam and block our mail servers from sending further emails.

For the past two months, our dedicated server team have worked 15 hour days analysing log files to detect mail accounts that are forwarding authenticated spam sent from their websites to other providers. This is proving to be a losing battle as new forwarders are added as fast as they can be removed.

The situation has become unsustainable and hiring a team to try and manage these forwarders would mean increasing prices to a point we are no longer competitive. Allowing our mail servers to be blocked and 30% of emails to be undelivered is also not an option. This leaves us with one option left, to disable the automated forwarding of emails to Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo mail services.

Forward emails in your email clients and webmail service will continue to work the same as previously, but all automated forwarding of emails to Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo mail services has been disabled.

While this will be unpopular with some customers, it is a decision we needed to make to allow reliable mail delivery for the majority of customers, and to prevent our mail servers from being black-listed by other email providers.

As many of our customers will appreciate, every day we and you receive countless spam emails. Very often these spam mails are being sent by what is known as SPAM-BOTS. A spambot is a computer application designed to send spam emails automatically in large quantities. It automatically collects email addresses from various sources on the Internet. Using the large number of email addresses collected, a spambot creates mailing lists and sends junk mail, also known as spam. These computer applications will sniff out contact forms, and even bypass certain safeguards put in place on the form, and then send spam to as many people as possible.

Our servers are not the only servers affected by spam-bots. Very recently 1&1, Fasthosts and other major providers have all been blacklisted in recent weeks/months as mail providers are clamping down on spam emails being forwarded from websites.

Forwarding and catch all email addresses are bad practices that while convenient cause a great deal of spam to be sent and generate bad reputations for the mail servers that allow them.

It is unfortunate that in stopping these bad practices that web hosts are getting hit hard as many web developers just forward website emails to their clients existing email address as it is the easy option.

If you need to have email in one place then you can setup POP, IMAP and SMTP in our webmail service, or the webmail services of Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc. so you can pickup your email from another mailbox rather than have it forwarded.

By picking up the email instead of having it sent through a forwarder means that the mail servers here are not blacklisted as the email sender.