diff --git a/docs/topics/downloader-middleware.rst b/docs/topics/downloader-middleware.rst
index a6a2f7d62..6d986bbf7 100644
--- a/docs/topics/downloader-middleware.rst
+++ b/docs/topics/downloader-middleware.rst
@@ -715,6 +715,15 @@ settings (see the settings documentation for more info):
 If :attr:`Request.meta <scrapy.http.Request.meta>` has ``dont_redirect``
 key set to True, the request will be ignored by this middleware.
 
+If you want to handle some redirect status codes in your spider, you can
+specify these in the ``handle_httpstatus_list`` spider attribute.
+
+For example, if you want the redirect middleware to ignore 301 and 302
+responses (and pass them through to your spider) you can do this::
+
+    class MySpider(CrawlSpider):
+        handle_httpstatus_list = [301, 302]
+
 
 RedirectMiddleware settings
 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
diff --git a/scrapy/downloadermiddlewares/redirect.py b/scrapy/downloadermiddlewares/redirect.py
index f439f43ae..363e56cb8 100644
--- a/scrapy/downloadermiddlewares/redirect.py
+++ b/scrapy/downloadermiddlewares/redirect.py
@@ -54,7 +54,8 @@ class RedirectMiddleware(BaseRedirectMiddleware):
     """Handle redirection of requests based on response status and meta-refresh html tag"""
 
     def process_response(self, request, response, spider):
-        if request.meta.get('dont_redirect', False):
+        if (request.meta.get('dont_redirect', False) or
+               response.status in getattr(spider, 'handle_httpstatus_list', [])):
             return response
 
         if request.method == 'HEAD':
diff --git a/tests/test_downloadermiddleware_redirect.py b/tests/test_downloadermiddleware_redirect.py
index 7e88e71af..be5bfcc6b 100644
--- a/tests/test_downloadermiddleware_redirect.py
+++ b/tests/test_downloadermiddleware_redirect.py
@@ -10,9 +10,9 @@ from scrapy.utils.test import get_crawler
 class RedirectMiddlewareTest(unittest.TestCase):
 
     def setUp(self):
-        crawler = get_crawler(Spider)
-        self.spider = crawler._create_spider('foo')
-        self.mw = RedirectMiddleware.from_crawler(crawler)
+        self.crawler = get_crawler(Spider)
+        self.spider = self.crawler._create_spider('foo')
+        self.mw = RedirectMiddleware.from_crawler(self.crawler)
 
     def test_priority_adjust(self):
         req = Request('http://a.com')
@@ -129,6 +129,17 @@ class RedirectMiddlewareTest(unittest.TestCase):
         self.assertEqual(req3.url, 'http://scrapytest.org/redirected2')
         self.assertEqual(req3.meta['redirect_urls'], ['http://scrapytest.org/first', 'http://scrapytest.org/redirected'])
 
+    def test_spider_handling(self):
+        smartspider = self.crawler._create_spider('smarty')
+        smartspider.handle_httpstatus_list = [404, 301, 302]
+        url = 'http://www.example.com/301'
+        url2 = 'http://www.example.com/redirected'
+        req = Request(url, meta={'dont_redirect': True})
+        rsp = Response(url, headers={'Location': url2}, status=301)
+        r = self.mw.process_response(req, rsp, smartspider)
+        self.assertIs(r, rsp)
+
+
 class MetaRefreshMiddlewareTest(unittest.TestCase):
 
     def setUp(self):