Why you shouldn't forward your OSU email account

[MaryTN]

<p>I thought this was interesting.

Warning Regarding Use of Free 3rd-Party Email Providers</p>

<p>OIT does not recommend forwarding your OSU email account to certain large commercial email providers(i.e., those such as Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail). While these services are popular and offer many powerful features, we are forced to make this recommendation due to problems we have had with these services.
The first, and more easily corrected, problem has to with spam spam filters on commercial email services. You can read more information about this in this article. <a href=“http://8help.osu.edu/35026.html[/url]”>Page has moved, please update your links</a></p>

<p>The second problem does not yet have a resolution, and affects all OSU email users, even those not forwarding their email account.</p>

<p>The roots of the problem somewhat involved, but here are the steps it follows: </p>

<p>*First, an OSU student or employee requests that his or her email account be forwarded to another address provided by a large commercial email provider.
*Eventually, a piece of unsolicited commercial email is sent to an OSU account.
*OSU’s mail servers automatically forward this message to the person’s other account.
*Servers for the person’s other email account “see” this message and decide that it’s spam. The servers look at the source of the messages and decide that they have come from Ohio State, since our mail servers were the last to “touch” the message.
*After this happens enough times, the servers for the other email account decide that Ohio State is a source of spam. They block or seriously delay all mail coming from Ohio State, whether it is forwarded or not. Ultimately, no one with an OSU email address and/or coming from an OSU computer can send mail to anyone with an address at the commercial service. </p>

<p>One further problem with the large free email services is that they provide very little front-line technical support, in order to keep costs low so that they can continue to offer these services for free. As a result, when OSU mail is blocked or delayed, it can be very difficult to get the block removed. (The Office of Information Technology cannot remove the block ourselves – we must ask the other email provider to do so.)
As a result, we must ask that, if possible, OSU users refrain from forwarding their mail to these large commercial email services. Some users have become accustomed to these services and will wish to continue using them; while we understand this, there may arise issues with email delivery which OIT cannot resolve. These issues could be anything up to and including permanent loss of email messages. Users who wish to continue to use these services must therefore assume a certain amount of risk.

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[osufunguy]

<p>100% agree!</p>