Dear HarmonySite administrator,

We have a complex spam issue with the email system that your HarmonySite uses, which we need your help in addressing.  It has to do with the special email addresses that the system sets up for your management team, for example president@yourgroupnamehere.com or info@yourgroupnamehere.com.  These email addresses, like most email addresses, receive spam.  This is normal.  This spam, like all other emails sent to those addresses, is automatically forwarded to the corresponding member's personal email address, as it is supposed to be.  Now, the person receiving those emails in their personal email account will, of course, MARK AS SPAM the spam emails they receive in their email program (Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, etc).  This is all to be expected.  However, when they mark such emails as spam, their email program reports back to the spam-monitoring systems of the world that the particular email is spam and that the sending server should be noted as a source of spam.

The problem is, in this instance, the source of the spam is OUR server, the HarmonySite server.  Even though the spam did not originate on our server, our server received the email addresses to president@yourgroupnamehere.com (etc) and automatically forwarded the message to the intended recipient.  In other words, the spam is seen as coming from our server!  For this reason, our server is gradually getting a bad "spam reputation", and more and more emails to/from our system are being rejected, reducing the overall deliverability of emails for your group.

To alleviate this issue, we need to ensure that such emails are NOT marked as spam in the recipient's email system.  Instead, they should simply delete the email.  That's it.  That's the only thing that needs to change.  I understand that people will prefer to mark emails as spam, so that they don't continue to receive emails from that spam-sender, but if they continue to do that, they run the risk of not getting any emails AT ALL to the special email address that they use (president@, etc).

It's POSSIBLE that we will need to take more drastic steps in the future to combat this issue.  We may need to abandon the use of the "forwarding" system altogether, and turn each of those special email address (president@, info@, etc) into a proper mailbox on the server, meaning that recipients would need to configure their email program with a new account if they want to send/receive emails on that email address.  This is an administrative headache, so I'm loathe to go down that road, but it may be necessary in the future.

Just so as you understand the big picture, what we're trying to do is now grossly frowned upon by anti-spam systems.  We are attempting to run an organisation (your group, choir, etc) with its own domain name and mail server, but we are trying to make it work such that everyone sends emails FROM THEIR OWN PERSONAL EMAIL ADDRESS through our server.  For example, Fred Smith is a member of Acme Harmony Choir, and has a personal email address of fredsmith@gmail.com.  Fred wants to be able to send emails FROM his own email address through the HarmonySite server.  Any receiving mail system would look at the emails received and notice that it was from an Gmail subscriber, but the email did NOT come from the Gmail servers - making the email very suspicious.  A few short years ago this wasn't an issue, but now all the email providers of the world are tightening up their anti-spam policies, and email systems like ours are becoming increasingly untenable.  There may come a day when ANYONE in your group who wants to send an email via your group's website or mailing lists must have their own proper email account on our server.  I SO don't want to get to that point, as it will be an administrative and support nightmare, but we may end up having no choice.

What you need to do....

Please send out the following email to all your members, changing the GROUPNAMEHERE.COM bit to your own domain name, of course...

Dear members,

We have an issue with our email system, and it's important that you please note the following:

If you are the holder of one of our special email addresses (e.g. president@GROUPNAMEHERE.COM, info@GROUPNAMEHERE.COM, etc), and emails to that address are forwarded to your own email address, then, whenever you receive a spam email sent to that address, it's important that you do NOT mark it as spam in your email program, and instead simply delete it.

This only applies to spam sent to the special email address, not spam sent directly to your personal email address, and it only applies to FUTURE emails, not existing spam you may have already received.

If you choose to disregard these instructions, you run the risk of never receiving any more emails from our mail server.

Regards,

Thanks for your understanding with this issue.

Cheers,

Mark.