On 2024-06-22 at 18:54:32 UTC-0400 (Sat, 22 Jun 2024 22:54:32 +0000)
Jeff Pang via Postfix-users <jeffp...@aol.com>
is rumored to have said:
But google "why email forwarding is a bad idea" will get a lot of
results.
That is an extraordinarily poor measure of anything other than Google's
indexing capability and their radical agnosticism on all disputable
questions.
Some of us remember the era when the classical sort of transparent
forwarding done via /etc/alias and ~/.forward was a common simple
working solution. It has not been that way for >20 years, but it takes a
long time for some people to accept that the world changes and one must
either change along with it or be left behind. Transparent forwarding is
infeasible of the modern net. Forwarding using SRS or encapsulation is
still usable if you are willing to accept that those methods are
imperfect and add complexity to a mail system.
Forwarding outside of a common administrative realm carries substantial
risk of mail being blocked, even with the use of SRS or encapsulation.
It can seriously impair the reputation of the forwarding site,
particularly with mass-market mailbox providers. It can often be a path
for spam to get into mailboxes that it could not get to directly. On the
other hand, it is the same functionality at the core of mailing lists
like this one, which people find useful.
Whether and how one supports automated forwarding on a mail system is a
very site-specific question, dependent largely on what your users
want/need and what sort of service you want to be providing. For
example, I run mail systems for small and medium sized businesses, most
(but not all) of whom have strict rules against users forwarding mail
anywhere. It's a business policy decision.
--
Bill Cole
b...@scconsult.com or billc...@apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo@toad.social and many *@billmail.scconsult.com
addresses)
Not Currently Available For Hire
_______________________________________________
Postfix-users mailing list -- postfix-users@postfix.org
To unsubscribe send an email to postfix-users-le...@postfix.org
