On Fri, 1 Feb 2008, David MacQuigg wrote:
Big ESPs won't listen to us, but they will listen to their customers. After
a few thousand complaints, or even questions like - "Hey Mr. Yahoo, how come
all my forwarded mail goes into the [bulk] folder? Why can't I whitelist my
forwarders?" After hearing that, they will eventually modify their
whitelisting option, so it works with a domain name, not necessarily a full
address.
Customers of a big ESP have no clue what "forwarding" is, and will therefore
never ask such questions. I've tried explaining forwarding to yahoo
and aol users, complete with postal analogies, but without much success.
It is worth taking note of what big ESP customers expect (at least
from my conversations). They expect their ESP account to act like a
mail store ("where I check my mail"). They expect to be to register/purchase
email addresses that end up in their "mail store" when sent to.
They do *not* expect to have to keep track of all their email addresses
(i.e. forwarders in most cases). Computers are supposed to keep track of stuff
for them. When I try to explain "forwarding", they want to know where
they can see the list of all their email addresses. The suggestion
that they should have to keep track of the list in order for email to work
properly is met with disbelief. This is a pretty reasonable set of end-user
expectations, actually.
So there might be more traction in educating end-users enough to demand
"a list of all my email addresses" from their ESP. Any ESP able to provide
that, will have the information needed to handle forwarders properly.
Especially if forwarders publish SPF records for the forwarded domains
(receivers can validate an alias forwarder by comparing the IP against the SPF
records of valid forwarded domains for that recipient - a technique I've
called checking the "pretend domain").
I'm not sure how such a "list of all my email addresses" would get
transferred when a customer decides to switch ESPs.
--
Stuart D. Gathman <stuart(_at_)bmsi(_dot_)com>
Business Management Systems Inc. Phone: 703 591-0911 Fax: 703 591-6154
"Confutatis maledictis, flammis acribus addictis" - background song for
a Microsoft sponsored "Where do you want to go from here?" commercial.
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