Did you know that if you forward your university e-mail to an e-mail account outside of the university, some of your messages may never reach you?

Last summer, the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, an independent organization dedicated to combating messaging abuse, reported that four of every five e-mail messages transmitted on the Internet are spam. In response to this ever-growing problem, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) – such as AOL, Hotmail, and Gmail – are aggressively working to reduce the number of unwanted messages delivered to their customers’ mailboxes. Legitimate messages forwarded from the university can and do get blocked on occasion because they are sometimes erroneously labeled as spam.

Why are they blocking our mail?

Each ISP has its own criteria for accepting or rejecting messages, and most of these criteria are closely guarded secrets. Because of the number of forwarded mail accounts at Maryland, ISPs receive many messages from the university’s e-mail systems. Some ISPs will temporarily reject ALL messages from our mail systems when the number of forwarded spam messages exceeds their threshold. Other ISPs will block delivery if their customers click the THIS IS SPAM button too many times for messages that passed through the university. These providers have determined that it makes better business sense to aggressively tackle spam even if a side effect is that some legitimate messages fall by the wayside.

What can we do?

Consider reading your university e-mail on one of the university servers. Why take a chance on missing an official message related to your job, your classes, or other activities at the university? If you do forward your e-mail, don’t be part of the problem. Reporting messages addressed to your @umd.edu address as spam doesn’t punish the spammer; rather, it just increases the likelihood that legitimate mail will be blocked.