For years I've had some addresses on a domain I host that forward to certain other external addresses. I administer the server for an organization of writers with disabilities. All example addresses here are fictitious.
Let's say I want an Email address committee@my.domain so people can write to a certain committee. It needs to be able to accept Email from anyone, and forward those Emails to, let's say, committee.member@gmail.com, another.member@hotmail.com, some.other.member@comcast.net, and yet.another.member@yahoo.com.
The obvious answer is to put a .forward file in committee's home directory that points to those addresses. However, this doesn't seem to be working near as well as it once did. Of course one vulnerability is that if the committee address is required to be posted on the web, or even exposed through a sender's address book getting compromised, spammers can send any Email they want to that address and my server will happily forward it along. To mitigate this, what I've been doing is to set up a second Email address called committeefwd which no one needs to even know about. Then when a desirable (not spam) Email comes to committee, I use the Mutt Email client's Bounce feature to send it to committeefwd, which does the actual forwarding.
The problem is that it seems Gmail especially doesn't like this. I assume they're seeing incoming Emails which still have lots of evidence of having been sent from the original sender's domain (DKIM signatures, headers, etc.), yet something seems funny about them, because of course it does! As a test, I sent an Email to myself from a Hotmail account, then manually forwarded it to a local account which forwards to a Gmail account. The message ended up in spam on Gmail.
It seems to me that what is needed here is something that can take an incoming message, make it look like a new message from my server, then send it to the destination addresses. At first I thought Sender Rewriting Scheme (SRS) might be the answer, but that would still leave lots of funny-tasting stuff in the message in terms of headers from the original sending domain, etc. I'm surprised someone hasn't written a program to do this.
Note that I could get the desired effect by using an Email client's forward function to forward the message to the secret forwarding address, but this has a few disadvantages. First, it adds unneeded clutter to the message as received by the final recipients. Second, they can't then just hit Reply in order to reply to the original sender, as I assume any reply sent that way would come back to the address that forwarded the message, not the original sender.
I hope I've explained this well enough so you can see the problem. Any thoughts? If not, where should I ask this? Please boost for reach. Thanks.
