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Google seems to have broken email forwarding

jwz.org

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Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#121

Post by throwawayaway »

npsimons wrote: post #93
throwawayaway wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well i've started marking ebay, linkedin and google+ stuff as spam. i'm sure somebody else did amazon the same favour... so... sorry? :)

Don't do this. Seriously, don't. It's one thing if you never asked to get additional emails or you can't opt out, but if you signed up for it, at least put in the same amount of effort to get out of it first. If that fails, sure, then start marking as spam. Otherwise, you're feeding false positives into the system, thereby degrading it on purpose.

it should be opt in instead of opt out then shouldn't it? maybe you should be directing your passion at those who feel opt out is appropriate.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#122

Post by clogston »

strictnein wrote: post #106
reidrac wrote: post #17

It's been years since I last did some serious email hosting, but it looks like the SPF rule is the problem. Google is forwarding mail for dnalounge.com but the SPF rule doesn't allow Google's SMTP servers to do that: "v=spf1 a mx ptr ~all". That could explain why the email gets in the spam box; failing SFP should increase the "spam score". Besides I think SOFTFAIL shouldn't be used in production; and I also doubt tha…

You are correct. SOFTFAILs should not be used and they will cause problems.

> SOFTFAILs should not be used and they will cause problems

Many SPF docs recommend using SOFTFAILs, including Gmail's docs [1]. What's your recommended SPF setup for his use case?

[1] https://support.google.com/a/answer/178723?hl=en

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#123

Post by agwa »

jedbrown wrote: post #105
reidrac wrote: post #17

It's been years since I last did some serious email hosting, but it looks like the SPF rule is the problem. Google is forwarding mail for dnalounge.com but the SPF rule doesn't allow Google's SMTP servers to do that: "v=spf1 a mx ptr ~all". That could explain why the email gets in the spam box; failing SFP should increase the "spam score". Besides I think SOFTFAIL shouldn't be used in production; and I also doubt tha…

Gmail's "send as" feature doesn't work that way. "A@dnalounge.com is logged in to GMail Web Client as A@gmail.com and sends a message to B@dnalounge.com. Google's SMTP servers deliver that to cerebrum.dnalounge.com with an envelope sender of A@gmail.com. (THIS IS WRONG ON SO MANY LEVELS.) cerebrum turns around and bent-pipe forwards back to Google's SMTP servers, who determine that Google's SPF record doesn't list ce…

In my >5 years experience running a mail server through which gmail users send authenticated mail, that is not accurate. To confirm that nothing has changed, I just looked at the mail logs, and in the last 24 hours I don't see a single instance of gmail doing what is described. In every single case, the envelope sender address is user@mydomain, not user@gmail.com.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#124

Post by fps »

pat2man wrote: post #108
Touche wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never used an email client that didn't support multiple accounts. So again, I'm not sure what problem he's trying to solve here. To be clear I'm not saying he shouldn't be able to set up his email this way and have it work, just that I don't get why he WANTS to do it this way. What is it accomplishing?

Gmail.com is this email client. You can't add an external account, you have to forward.

gmail.com supports fetching email from external servers via POP (it's under settings, accounts). His users could use that and skip most of gmail's spam filtering completely. It doesn't (reliably) support forwarding mail to it without using some list software in the middle. I believe if jwz set up mailman or something similar, it wouldn't have a problem with that, because mailman would properly re-write the envelope sender as the list address.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#125

Post by silvestre »

pat2man wrote: post #108
Touche wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never used an email client that didn't support multiple accounts. So again, I'm not sure what problem he's trying to solve here. To be clear I'm not saying he shouldn't be able to set up his email this way and have it work, just that I don't get why he WANTS to do it this way. What is it accomplishing?

Gmail.com is this email client. You can't add an external account, you have to forward.

You can add external POP accounts, and I think that would be the solution for OPs problem.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#126

Post by spullara »

Gmail will dump emails from google.com into my spam folder if I have them forwarded from another gmail account. It is infuriating that they can't even solve this problem within their own domain.

Example of a message from Google, to a custom domain gmail account, forwarded to another custom domain gmail account — found in my spam folder:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/uwxjdji8n6g6jfo/Screenshot%202015-...

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#127

Post by frozenport »

reuven wrote: post #83

I have been running my own SMTP server for about 25 years. I finally decided, in the last month or so, that it just wasn't worth the effort involved in handling spam and anti-spam stuff -- not only from Google, but from other providers who are so worried about spam that they falsely tag all sorts of stuff as spam. I found that accurate configuration and maintenance, including of SPF and DKIM, wasn't worth my time and…

You can do it for nearly free with Amazon AWS.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#128

Post by frozenport »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #49

I was looking into using email for rich content delivery yesterday as part of this "Watch me program" thing I'm doing. How difficult could it be to send rich html to somebody on email? Turns out, freaking difficult. For one of the simplest protocols in the world, email is now a byzantine disaster. Different clients render things differently, different providers block or don't block things -- and that's not even getti…

Do you think the strict restrictions reduce spam, and phishing attacks, and email client hacks? For example, many clients dont let you change the default colorbof a hyperlink.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#129

Post by clogston »

shiggerino wrote: post #52
jimrandomh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason, gmail classifies nearly all of the transactional email I get from Amazon (order acknowledgements, shipping notifications, etc) as spam, and no matter how many I catch and un-mark, it won't stop. Spam classification is a hard problem, but I don't think they've put the false-positive/false-negative tradeoff in the right place, and they really need some safety valves like offering to whitelist an addres…

It would also be nice if you could disable spam filtering entirely and run your own client-side.

> It would also be nice if you could disable spam filtering entirely and run your own client-side.

It's horribly convoluted but it /is/ possible to do so:

http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/69442/how-to-disa...

I've been running it this way for about 18 months now after having a few important emails get gobbled up by their spam filter.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#130

Post by reidrac »

clogston wrote: post #122
strictnein wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct. SOFTFAILs should not be used and they will cause problems.

> SOFTFAILs should not be used and they will cause problems Many SPF docs recommend using SOFTFAILs, including Gmail's docs [1]. What's your recommended SPF setup for his use case? [1] https://support.google.com/a/answer/178723?hl=en

SOFTFAIL is only contributing to the anti-spam score (in theory) as it is supposed to allow the mail pass, but the host is still unauthorized [1].

Using "~all" means that you can only tell which hosts are definitely allowed to send mail for the domain, and you're unsure of anything else.

IMHO that reduces the effectivity of SPF. SOFTFAIL is useful as a debug method when you're testing rules and you don't want mail to be rejected by mistake; but I think it should be transitory and finally replaced by FAIL ("-all").

If you configure SPF to allow mail being delivered by Google's SMTP servers for that domain, you're again reducing its effectivity (Google's SMTP servers are used to send spam); but still better than a "SOFTFAIL all" I think :)

[1] http://www.openspf.org/RFC_4408#op-result-softfail

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