Effective 07/09/2009, 3Essentials is updating it's policy regarding forwarding of email to other email providers:
 

• The activity "email forwarding to other email providers" is intended to describe the practice of configuring an email account hosted at 3Essentials to forward all email received at that address to another email address which is not hosted at 3Essentials.
  
  • For example, 3Essentials customer "Bob" uses the control panel or mail admin tools provided by 3Essentials to enable forwarding on email account bob@bob.com (hosted at 3Essentials) to forward all mail received there over to his AOL address, bob@aol.com. 
     
• In general, 3Essentials discourages the use of forwarding to other email providers altogether, and due to the reasons noted in the following bullets, many other hosting providers are adopting similar opinions.  Forwarding causes these issues:
  • Unnecessary complexity in spam filtering by clouding the original sending IP address, resulting in reduced effectiveness of ant-spam techniques which examine source and/or delivering IP address.
     
  • Potentially degrading the mail sending reputation of the forwarding email service provider, by falsely appearing as if forwarding mails originated from the forwarding mail provider's network.  Mail reputation is increasingly being used as an anti-spam consideration, forwarding dilutes it's effectiveness, and potentially erroneously associating the forwarding provider with the email originator.
     
  • Unnecessary increase in Internet and email service provider traffic.
     
  • We use the term "unnecessary" because the same objective (mail from multiple email addresses being delivered to a single inbox) can be accomplished through other methods without these negative impacts.   For example, all current email clients (i.e., Outlook Express or similar) support the ability to POP (retrieve mail) from multiple mailboxes.  So instead of having mail received at bob@mydomain.com forwarded to bob@aol.com, and POP'ing (retrieving) the mail from just bob@aol.com, the user could simply configure his email client (i.e., Outlook Express or other) to POP (retrieve mail) from both bob@mydomain.com AND from bob@aol.com each as separate mail accounts, separate POP connections/configurations.  Messages from both email accounts would still end up consolidated into his single "inbox" in his email client.    If you're using AOL's online services, contact AOL for information on configuring their mail services to POP a non-AOL.com email address.
     
• 3Essentials reserves the right to limit or restrict forwarding to other email service providers at any time and without notice should we, in our sole assessment, decide that forwarding to that provider is negatively impacting our ability to deliver regular, non-forwarded email to that email service provider. Generally we will restrict forwarding to these providers due to their email usage policies or difficulties in obtaining information from them on their active blacklists, blacklisting policies, or their spam/abuse concerns.
   
• 3Essentials does not allow forwarding to the following email service providers.  In order to allow us to continue to provide forwarding to other providers, we are keeping the forwarding feature enabled.  However, if you are notified that a forwarder to a one of these domains has been disabled on your account, and you re-enable it, 3Essentials may be required to take further action, up to and including disabling mail services on your domain.
  • AOL.com
  • comcast.net
  • verizon.net