Preventing forwarders being created to gmail

Ishware

Well-Known Member
Nov 7, 2003
211
6
168
Williamsburg, VA
cPanel Access Level
Root Administrator
I've done some searching, and I've found some decade-old threads that say the hooks no longer work.......... and there's apparently a related new feature: SpamAssassin Scan Email Forwarders

But nothing I've found so far does what I want: I want to prevent anyone from creating a forwarder that goes to certain domains. Gmail for now (gmail.com and googlemail.com I know for sure); maybe aol.com, yahoo.com, and hotmail.com would be good ideas, too...

What started this quest: I received notifications that my forwards to gmail are creating backscatter spam to a third party. As I have a zero tolerance for spam, I want to close this loophole. I don't, to be honest, quite understand how it works - I think it's gmail getting the message and instead of just refusing it, I think they're sending a notification to the third party.... meh. But either way, from what I've been told, the way to stop this is to disallow forwarders to gmail.

Meanwhile, I did find a thread that said that if you create a forwader AND a mailbox and enable SpamAssassin, then it'll scan for spam and hopefully lessen the flow - but I want the flow stopped, not lessened. AND in that case you have to clean out the useless mailboxes periodically, so..... it's a terrible solution.

Anyone have any ideas?
 

cPanelMichael

Administrator
Staff member
Apr 11, 2011
47,880
2,260
463
But nothing I've found so far does what I want: I want to prevent anyone from creating a forwarder that goes to certain domains. Gmail for now (gmail.com and googlemail.com I know for sure); maybe aol.com, yahoo.com, and hotmail.com would be good ideas, too...
There's no native feature that will block the actual creation of the forwarder in the cPanel interface, as discussed here:

block forwarding

You can open a new feature request for this functionality if you are not comfortable developing a custom script to implement this behavior.

Thank you.