cPanel mail forwarders allow you to forward mail to other mail accounts on the same web hosting server or to external addresses. Be careful when forwarding to external addresses, as it could result in your server being blacklisted and thus unable to send mail to some places.
When you create a forwarder such as for you@yourdomain.com to forward to an external address, such as joe@Hotmail.com, all mail addressed to you@yourdomain.com will go to the external mailbox. That includes legitimate mail and, of course, spam and possibly malware. That’s where the problem begins.
Any spam sent to your mail forwarder address is immediately forwarded to the external address, where the receiving server may conclude that your hosting server sent the spam (or at least relayed it, which it did) and therefore blacklist the server. Once the server is on a blacklist, any mail sent from your server will be rejected by many ISPs and mail providers.
If the external address is at AOL, then the AOL user can compound the problem by hitting the “This is spam” button. AOL sees your web hosting server as the last relay of the spam, and suddenly you are the bad guy. AOL has blacklisted web hosting servers many times because of this.
Mail forwarding to external addresses can be useful. However, you must be careful and stay informed because some mail operators, such as AOL, are particularly likely to block servers such as these for forwarding mail.
You should never forward to AOL. You may Google for other articles to verify my opinion, as this is a widespread problem. AOL blacklists often for forwarded mail, so you should advise your hosting clients and users never to forward to AOL. Forwarding to Hotmail and RoadRunner has also been problematic at times, because they also have a history of often blacklisting for forwarding. We could likely add other ISPs and mail providers to that list, who often block shared servers due to mail forwarding.
I recently confronted this issue again for two client companies. Both use cPanel forwarders to ISP mail accounts. Due to blacklisting of my reseller web hosting server’s mail server IP, the ISP blocked mail from our web hosting server. Result: those users were unable to receive any mail from their mail forwarders, so they were receiving no mail at all since the forwarders are their primary addresses.
Never forward to AOL, be cautious when forwarding to Hotmail or RoadRunner, and be vigilant when forwarding anywhere else. This problem will likely grow more common due to the growing spam volume that ISPs combat.
Hey
Below are the Server Uptime Figures for Web Hosting Buzz for the month of October 2008. They have been directly copied from our backend server monitoring system called Nagios.
alpha.whbdns.com 100.000%
asteroid.whbdns.com 98.990%
athena.whbdns.com 100.000%
bear.ultrawhb.com 100.000%
business2.whbdns.com 100.000%
cat.whbdns.com 100.000%
cheetah.ultrawhb.com 100.000%
comet.fastwhb.com 100.000%
fish.whbdns.com 100.000%
fox.whbdns.com 100.000%
galaxy.whbdns.com 100.000%
gold.whbdns.com 100.000%
hr1.whbdns.com 100.000%
hr2.whbdns.com 100.000%
hr3.whbdns.com 100.000%
hr4.whbdns.com 100.000%
intense1.intensewhb.com 100.000%
manatee.ultrawhb.com 100.000%
milkyway.whbdns.com 100.000%
moon.whbdns.com 100.000%
panda.ultrawhb.com 100.000%
planet.whbdns.com 100.000%
sd1.whbdns.com 100.000%
shared1.ultrawhb.com 100.000%
shared2.ultrawhb.com 100.000%
shared3.ultrawhb.com 99.978%
shared4.ultrawhb.com 100.000%
shared5.ultrawhb.com 100.000%
shared6.whbdns.com 100.000%
shared7.whbdns.com 100.000%
shared8.whbdns.com 100.000%
shared9.whbdns.com 100.000%
shark.whbdns.com 100.000%
sky.whbdns.com 100.000%
solaris.whbdns.com 100.000%
ss1.webhostingbuzz.com 100.000%
ss2.webhostingbuzz.com 100.000%
ss3.webhostingbuzz.com 100.000%
ss4.webhostingbuzz.com 100.000%
ss5.webhostingbuzz.com 100.000%
star.whbdns.com 100.000%
sun.whbdns.com 100.000%
usa.ultrawhb.com 100.000%
venus.whbdns.com 100.000%
zeus.whbdns.com 100.000%
rs1.whbdns.com 100.000%
rs2.whbdns.com 100.000%
rs3.whbdns.com 100.000%
rs4.whbdns.com 99.977%
rs5.whbdns.com 100.000%
rs6.whbdns.com 99.998%
rs7.whbdns.com 99.975%
rs9.whbdns.com 100.000%
rs10.whbdns.com 100.000%
rs11.whbdns.com 100.000%
rs12.whbdns.com 100.000%
rs14.whbdns.com 100.000%
rs15.whbdns.com 100.000%
rs16.whbdns.com 100.000%
rs17.whbdns.com 100.000%
Please note that these figures do not include our dedicated server clients. As you can see we had another great month and hope to continue this trend…
Thanks
You probably don’t geek out about server technology the way we do, but we’d like to let you know a bit about our hosting environment so you can feel a bit more secure at night knowing your site(s) are being hosting in a good place with good equipment.
We’ve recently migrated much of our business to a colocation facility at Atlanta NAP. The caged facility in Atlanta, Georgia will house over 1,000 servers. There are motion detecting IP cameras throughout for maximum security as well as a ten foot razor fence. HSRP drops throughout provide redundant internet connections should one fail and a redundant paralleled power system ensures the facility will not suffer outages. Like other servers already used by WebHostingBuzz, the servers at the AtlantaNAP location will have 8 CPU Intel Xeon processors and 8 GB of RAM for increased performance, and are cooled by Atlanta NAP’s N+1 cooling towers and redundant N+1 pumps. To further improve performance, this facility also sits directly on one of Atlanta’s main fiber backbones and is part of a metro ethernet ring based on Extreme Networks 10 gig technology.
Here are the specs of the servers:
Supermicro dual xeon 5410, with a total of 8 CPUS at 2.33ghz
8gb ECC RAM
RAID5 1 terabyte hard drives
If you aren’t a hardware geek, no worries, these are very capable servers and we look forward to the performance boost we can offer our customers.
Yes, that is true. We have recently found out that Google has upgraded Web Hosting Buzz from PR 6 to PR 7. PR (page rank) is a technology google uses to find out how many quality links point to a web site. We would like to thank all our clients and affiliates that have helped us gain this status.
Thank you very much. 
Hey
Below are the Server Uptime Figures for Web Hosting Buzz for the month of September 2008. They have been directly copied from our backend server monitoring system called Nagios.
alpha.whbdns.com 100.000%
asteroid.whbdns.com 99.982%
athena.whbdns.com 99.948%
bear.ultrawhb.com 100.000%
business2.whbdns.com 99.916%
cat.whbdns.com 99.896%
cheetah.ultrawhb.com 99.694%
comet.fastwhb.com 100.000%
fish.whbdns.com 99.864%
fox.whbdns.com 99.776%
galaxy.whbdns.com 100.000%
gold.whbdns.com 99.930%
hr1.whbdns.com 99.809%
hr2.whbdns.com 100.000%
hr3.whbdns.com 100.000%
hr4.whbdns.com 100.000%
intense1.intensewhb.com 100.000%
manatee.ultrawhb.com 100.000%
milkyway.whbdns.com 100.000%
moon.whbdns.com 100.000%
panda.ultrawhb.com 100.000%
planet.whbdns.com 100.000%
sd1.whbdns.com 100.000%
shared1.ultrawhb.com 100.000%
shared2.ultrawhb.com 99.234%
shared3.ultrawhb.com 99.759%
shared4.ultrawhb.com 100.000%
shared5.ultrawhb.com 99.932%
shared6.whbdns.com 100.000%
shared7.whbdns.com 100.000%
shared8.whbdns.com 100.000%
shared9.whbdns.com 100.000%
shark.whbdns.com 99.792%
sky.whbdns.com 100.000%
solaris.whbdns.com 99.913%
ss1.webhostingbuzz.com 100.000%
ss2.webhostingbuzz.com 100.000%
ss3.webhostingbuzz.com 100.000%
ss4.webhostingbuzz.com 100.000%
ss5.webhostingbuzz.com 100.000%
star.whbdns.com 100.000%
sun.whbdns.com 98.700%
usa.ultrawhb.com 99.897%
venus.whbdns.com 100.000%
zeus.whbdns.com 99.894%
Average 99.910%
rs1.whbdns.com 100.000%
rs2.whbdns.com 99.741%
rs3.whbdns.com 99.879%
rs4.whbdns.com 99.844%
rs5.whbdns.com 99.977%
rs6.whbdns.com 100.000%
rs7.whbdns.com 100.000%
rs9.whbdns.com 100.000%
rs10.whbdns.com 100.000%
rs11.whbdns.com 100.000%
rs12.whbdns.com 100.000%
rs14.whbdns.com 100.000%
rs15.whbdns.com 99.780%
rs16.whbdns.com 100.000%
rs17.whbdns.com 100.000%
Average 99.948%
Please note that these figures do not include our dedicated server clients. As you can see we had another great month and hope to continue this trend…
Thanks
Yesterday, the stock markets tumbled as a result of the rejection of the bank bailout bill. Although we certainly aren’t happy about this situation, we want you to know that we are an owner operative, cash flow positive company. We have diversified financial headquarters in both the U.S. and Dubai, so we should have no issues through this financial turmoil. We will continue to focus on offering you the fastest, most stable, and economical hosting company on the market.
To see our offerings, please check out our website.
Hosting with WHB will save you from this guy
If your going to be a hosting reseller, it’s important to know that the hosting company you are dealing with isn’t just some creepy guy who set up some servers in his mom’s basement. Matt Russell has been in the hosting industry for nine years and has been the WebHostingBuzz COO for four. Learn more about WHB’s reseller and affiliate programs as well as what we are all about in his interview with Reseller Guide.
–Michelle Greer, WHB Marketing Ninja