Not sure how many know this, but if your customer forwards their email to AOL, and than reports spam as spam, AOL sees your server as spamming, not the actual server which was spamming.

For those who do know, how do you deal with this? Your client doesn't know they are doing wrong, and if you are large enough, then this becomes a problem that is a pain to work with every day.

I've talked to AOL and they recognize the problem, but offer no solution.

Basically, customerA forwards their mail from your.server to customerA@aol.com, they then check customerA@aol.com and report the spam as spam...

Now AOL sees your server as spamming, and you get points or whatever they do until they decide that enough is enough and they blacklist you.

Now you don't have any spammers on your server, only clients who aren't aware of what they are doing.

What do you do?

Originally posted by nickn
Not sure how many know this, but if your customer forwards their email to AOL, and than reports spam as spam, AOL sees your server as spamming, not the actual server which was spamming.

AOL has advised us that this is a very recent change in policy for them. Probably anyone smaller than AOL could never get away with it, of course.

Eventually the only way to avoid being blacklisted will be to enforce Spam filtering on forwarding rules. And then perhaps someday forwarding itself will be rare (forwarding doesn't play nicely with things like SPF, either).

Kevin

Perhaps you could get listed with http://trusted-forwarder.org/