eMail forwarding

[Texsox]

Linky

 

As always, more, much more than this, at the link.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The post office forwards letters when a person moves, and telephone companies likewise forward calls. Should Internet companies be required to forward e-mails to customers who switch providers?

 

There is no mandate governing e-mail forwarding, and industry officials say imposing one would be costly and unnecessary. But federal regulators are looking at the issue more closely following a complaint from a former America Online customer who claims an abrupt termination of service devastated her business.

 

Gail Mortenson, a Washington-based freelance editor, in July filed a six-page petition with the Federal Communications Commission, which opened a 30-day public comment period that ends Oct. 26, followed by another 30-day period for replies.

 

Mortenson said in her complaint that she lost potential clients because they couldn't reach her, and she requested that Internet service providers, such as Time Warner Inc.'s AOL LLC, be required to forward e-mail traffic from a closed account to a new e-mail address designated by customers for at least six months.

 

FCC spokesman Clyde Ensslin said he wasn't aware of previous petitions regarding e-mail address forwarding or portability.

 

While mainstream consumer groups have not taken up the cause, it is starting to gain some attention in Congress.

 

Mortenson said a representative from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., contacted her Monday to say they were watching to see how FCC handles her complaint.

 

 

[HuskyCaucasian]

i don't think 6 months is unreasonable.

I am not sure where I stand on this, but it's not a bad idea.

[southsideirish71]

This is a waste of bandwidth and time. 90% of Internet email is spam/malware anyways. So do you really want to setup large amounts of traffic being generated, sometimes in duplicate. Take the 5 minutes, and send an email to your contacts telling them of the new email. Hell, give them a reminder a few days before the switch. Then move on. Anyone using an AOL or freeware email to run their business is asking for trouble. Purchase a domain, use it for your business, and set the email up that way. You can move it as you want. You control it, not the ISP.

 

 

Edited October 24, 2007 by southsideirish71

[Texsox]

This is a waste of bandwidth and time. 90% of Internet email is spam/malware anyways. So do you really want to setup large amounts of traffic being generated, sometimes in duplicate. Take the 5 minutes, and send an email to your contacts telling them of the new email. Hell, give them a reminder a few days before the switch. Then move on. Anyone using an AOL or freeware email to run their business is asking for trouble. Purchase a domain, use it for your business, and set the email up that way. You can move it as you want. You control it, not the ISP.

 

Most of the load the US Post office carries are bulk mailers, should snail mail be forwarded? With more and more people opting for electronic billing, important documents are not being forwarded. Just like snail mail forwarding was a good idea for our parents, email forwarding will be the standard for this generation.

[southsider2k5]

If the concern is E-bills, go in and change your email address in your account. It is really simple.

[Texsox]

If the concern is E-bills, go in and change your email address in your account. It is really simple.

The same was true of snail mail, yet we found value in forwarding. Snail mail forwarding is much more costly than email forwarding. Why shouldn't our emails be considered on the same level with our telephone number and snail mail address? I believe, for most of us, our email is more important than at least one of the other two.

[southsider2k5]

The same was true of snail mail, yet we found value in forwarding. Snail mail forwarding is much more costly than email forwarding. Why shouldn't our emails be considered on the same level with our telephone number and snail mail address? I believe, for most of us, our email is more important than at least one of the other two.

 

You are also forgetting the big obvious difference between the two... One is run by the government, one is run by public industry. Once you leave as a customer, why should it be up to a for profit entity to take care of you? Are you willing to keep paying them for this extra service, until which time you quit forwarding? If the answer is no, it shouldn't be their burden.

[YASNY]

You are also forgetting the big obvious difference between the two... One is run by the government, one is run by public industry. Once you leave as a customer, why should it be up to a for profit entity to take care of you? Are you willing to keep paying them for this extra service, until which time you quit forwarding? If the answer is no, it shouldn't be their burden.

 

But that's why we need government to control everything.

[Texsox]

You are also forgetting the big obvious difference between the two... One is run by the government, one is run by public industry. Once you leave as a customer, why should it be up to a for profit entity to take care of you? Are you willing to keep paying them for this extra service, until which time you quit forwarding? If the answer is no, it shouldn't be their burden.

 

Telephone company does it. Isn't that the same?

[southsider2k5]

Telephone company does it. Isn't that the same?

 

If you switch companies, they shouldn't do it either. Seriously, explain to me why the burden should be placed on someone who is no longer getting compensated for their services?

[YASNY]

If you switch companies, they shouldn't do it either. Seriously, explain to me why the burden should be placed on someone who is no longer getting compensated for their services?

 

In the case of the phone companies, the burden, I believe, is being accepted the company that is getting you as a new customer. An email provider can do the same thing if they want your business and think it's a worthwhile burden to bear to get your business.

[southsideirish71]

Telephone company does it. Isn't that the same?

 

For my small company. We receive 160k emails for 3000 users, 95.7% of the emails are garbage per day. To limit this, we have to employ a series of security devices and technologies so we are not liable for passing on malware or other items. All of these are at a pretty decent cost.

 

50k for a email security device, and you need at least 2 for redundancy. Plus subscription updates for virus updates.

My T3 is 3500 for the email and browsing, again 2 for redunancy.

30k x 2 for the firewalls that protect the email servers.

Then the costs of me to watch it, not that I complain about this.

 

Now take those costs and expand them quite a bit, and you will see the difference in the margin of costs that the ISP has to deal with. Its not like the telephone company at all. The telephone company doesn't transport the phone call to the end, and then relay it across their network eating up their bandwidth and resources. They are able to deal with it via addressing at its perimeter. Phone numbers are also portable. If you really love your phone number, you can port it to another provider. Thats what I did to move to vonage. You can't do that with ISP's and how domain names work with email. There is a slight difference in the size and impact to bandwidth that email deals with. What about troubleshooting when you lose an email. Now you have to deal with 2 companies at least, to find what happened to your email. Each of them will be pointing to the other saying, tell them to fix it.

 

Or we can take some time on our own, and make the changes.

 

 

 

 

[Texsox]

For my small company. We receive 160k emails for 3000 users, 95.7% of the emails are garbage per day. To limit this, we have to employ a series of security devices and technologies so we are not liable for passing on malware or other items. All of these are at a pretty decent cost.

 

50k for a email security device, and you need at least 2 for redundancy. Plus subscription updates for virus updates.

My T3 is 3500 for the email and browsing, again 2 for redunancy.

30k x 2 for the firewalls that protect the email servers.

Then the costs of me to watch it, not that I complain about this.

 

Now take those costs and expand them quite a bit, and you will see the difference in the margin of costs that the ISP has to deal with. Its not like the telephone company at all. The telephone company doesn't transport the phone call to the end, and then relay it across their network eating up their bandwidth and resources. They are able to deal with it via addressing at its perimeter. Phone numbers are also portable. If you really love your phone number, you can port it to another provider. Thats what I did to move to vonage. You can't do that with ISP's and how domain names work with email. There is a slight difference in the size and impact to bandwidth that email deals with. What about troubleshooting when you lose an email. Now you have to deal with 2 companies at least, to find what happened to your email. Each of them will be pointing to the other saying, tell them to fix it.

 

Or we can take some time on our own, and make the changes.

 

If you forwarded each customer who leaves three months, how much would you have to expand? They would not be able to send, so that cuts their traffic down, presumably in half, and it would not be permanent, only for a limited time. I could also see stripping any attachments. For that matter couldn't the forwarded message be dropped all the way down to a simple text message,

 

Dear Former Customer

We rejected an email from [email protected] to your former address.

Please advise them of your new address.

 

 

Plus, if traffic is coming into you with a faulty address, doesn't that take up bandwidth? Your malware and other programs would not change. When someone leaves, they will continue to receive spam mail for quite some time, so I don't see how that would change with forwarding. And if they do forget to inform someone they are changing ISPs when they receive the reminder and change those records, that cuts down on the future mail you have to deal with.

[southsideirish71]

If you forwarded each customer who leaves three months, how much would you have to expand? They would not be able to send, so that cuts their traffic down, presumably in half, and it would not be permanent, only for a limited time. I could also see stripping any attachments. For that matter couldn't the forwarded message be dropped all the way down to a simple text message,

 

Dear Former Customer

We rejected an email from [email protected] to your former address.

Please advise them of your new address.

Plus, if traffic is coming into you with a faulty address, doesn't that take up bandwidth? Your malware and other programs would not change. When someone leaves, they will continue to receive spam mail for quite some time, so I don't see how that would change with forwarding. And if they do forget to inform someone they are changing ISPs when they receive the reminder and change those records, that cuts down on the future mail you have to deal with.

 

Sending those notices out are a bad idea. As friendly and as nice at it seems, the spam reputation filters like senderbase, trusted source, or others will blacklist you based on community activity and how you are preceived. Once you wind up on one of those blacklists, you have to change your IP for the most part because dealing with the appeals process while lots of companies spam devices drop your email is not a good way to go. That impact, costs of losing emails for a corporation or isp outweigh any individual gain.

 

Now on the, well they continue to get spam anyways so why dont you just forward it. The system that we use for email security is the same one that AOL and Yahoo use. Our's will query our email directory for the user, if the user doesnt exist or is no longer active it will drop the email in the midst of the handshake. So in fact we never receive the email. Hanging up on the handshake is quick, and doesnt consume a lot of bandwidth. Eventually even the most hardened bots will stop forwarding to it. This is the recommended way to deal with positive spam results, bots, and addresses that do not exist.

 

The other item that I forgot to mention with this, was cost of storage. The large amounts of email, and spam consume a lot of disk space when stored. Storage happens for compliance, and for law enforcement reasons. That storage also impacts on your backups, and the rest of the infrastructure. The waterfall effect of spam, or storage of non-esential email can add to the large costs.

 

[Texsox]

I guess I wasn't clear.

 

SPAM, continue as always. Whatever was happening while a customer, continues after they leave.

 

Incoming Legit email. Forwarded without attachments and in whatever form is easiest for the ISP. Or if it is easier and less expensive, some web based browser interface so they can look. Bottom way, allow the former customer some manner to see who is sending them legit traffic so they can advise that sender about their new address.

 

No outgoing.

 

I can't believe the same ISPs that can afford 30 day free trials will be crippled if they have to forward emails for 60 or 90 days. If their bandwidth is that tight how could they expand if new customers signed up?