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Google seems to have broken email forwarding

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Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#131

Post by microtonal »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #112
bhauer wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which ironically is the reason I most often hear from Gmail advocates/apologists for why they advocate Gmail over running your own e-mail server. I don't disagree. E-mail is a mess. Still, on the whole, for any person or organization with modest technical chops, I feel the freedom and decentralization (which is a positive for the entire ecosystem) is reason alone for retaining control by self-hosting.

It's all about cost/benefit analysis. Maintaining an e-mail server and not getting overwhelmed by spam is hard; making sure you your e-mails will be received is even harder. Most of small businesses or organizations simply don't have resources to do that, if you count in the value lost when business e-mails get flagged as spam. Decentralization is cool and all, but until we have some kind of self-contained, easy to d…

it's hard to me to recommend anything other than GMail to people

There are other companies that offer e-mail services, without the embrace, expand, and extinguish strategy that Google seems to follow these days.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#132

Post by nitrogen »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #118
ccozan wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not recommend this. Amazon emails can be unsubscribed. And they are not really spam, they are not coming unsolicited, aren't they?

I get a ton of unsolicited email from Amazon. It tends to be of the form "order confirmation for product XXXXX" or "your order of XXXXX has shipped". I don't view this as particularly unreasonable, though.

Emails in response to you direct action (placing an order) are the very definition of solicited email.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#133

Post by jbeda »

I'm late to this thread, but hopefully I can add some value.

I've recently been through this for my own personal email. I have a domain with some interesting rewrites to the address that I forward to GMail. I put together my set up into a Docker container:

https://github.com/jbeda/docker-postfix-forwarder

It is worth breaking this down into each direction -- sending and receiving.

Sending

This is the easy side. You simply run an SMTP server and have GMail use this to send. If you want others to not mark you as spam you'll want to look at setting up SPF (publishing which IPs are allowed to send from your domain) and perhaps DKIM (digitally sign your email).

GMail used to allow sending from aliases directly without an external SMTP server but that is disabled. Old accounts are grandfathered in.

Receiving

This is where things get complicated. Essentially, you are having folks send mail to your server and you are turning around and relaying that email to GMail. GMail has a hard job here. It doesn't know if it should trust you and that you are acting on behalf of the user or if you are an open relay sending spam. I've found after I change my forwarding set up I have to police my spam folder for a couple of days to retrain GMail.

The real complication here is SPF. Sending domains will publish their own SPF records. When doing this they can either specify a soft or hard fail. If they specify a soft fail (`~all`) then there is a chance that GMail won't mark it as spam. But if they use soft fail (`-all`) then it will go to spam all the time. The problem is that the sending domain (say evite.com) doesn't list your relay IP as having permission to send that mail and so GMail respects that.

Having GMail pull the mail via POP is one solution here but that introduces latency.

Or you can rewrite the "envelope sender" so that you are honest about the mail coming through your server. The accepted scheme to do this is SRS. This is not a silver bullet though. If you are forwarding a lot of spam, GMail may decide that your SRS domain is spammy and penalize all incoming mail.

Also, if you are forwarding a lot of spam, GMail will throttle you. It'll have you back off and wait to forward more mail. Your best bet is to find ways to eliminate obvious spam before you forward to GMail.

My solution seems to be working okay for now, but it is a pain the ass and I'm honestly not sure it is worth it.

EDIT: Here is a tutorial that I used to inform my approach. It is worth digging in to. http://seasonofcode.com/posts/setting-up-dkim-and-srs-in-pos...

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#134

Post by DanielBMarkham »

frozenport wrote: post #128
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.

I think you'd be better off with an open standard, rich, dynamic html that runs wherever the user is. Then put all the sophistication in whitelisting senders. We also need to bolt-in secured messaging so that nobody except the people corresponding have any idea what's in the message.

The way it's set up now, with hundreds of vendors implementing different control protocols and tens of thousands of spammers trying to break in? I don't see anybody being happy -- some spammers get in anyway, and email users have different experiences for the same dang net service. Admins want to pull their hair out. It really is a miracle things work as well as they do.

If we can't get email working right? It doesn't portend for a bright future for the rest of internet traffic.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#135

Post by TeMPOraL »

microtonal wrote: post #131
TeMPOraL wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all about cost/benefit analysis. Maintaining an e-mail server and not getting overwhelmed by spam is hard; making sure you your e-mails will be received is even harder. Most of small businesses or organizations simply don't have resources to do that, if you count in the value lost when business e-mails get flagged as spam. Decentralization is cool and all, but until we have some kind of self-contained, easy to d…

it's hard to me to recommend anything other than GMail to people There are other companies that offer e-mail services, without the embrace, expand, and extinguish strategy that Google seems to follow these days.

I haven't checked the new Outlook recently; maybe it's good. But all others that I know offer subpar service and honestly, look like crap. UX is important. For example, I cringe whenever someone makes me to use Roundcube-based webmail.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#136

Post by thaumasiotes »

nitrogen wrote: post #132
thaumasiotes wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get a ton of unsolicited email from Amazon. It tends to be of the form "order confirmation for product XXXXX" or "your order of XXXXX has shipped". I don't view this as particularly unreasonable, though.

Emails in response to you direct action (placing an order) are the very definition of solicited email.

No, emails that you ask to receive are the definition of solicited email. When was the last time the grocery store emailed you confirming that you'd just paid for your groceries?

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#137

Post by tjohns »

reidrac wrote: post #130
clogston wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It's been some time since I ran my own mail server, but from what I recall, some spam filters actually give more negative weight (i.e. message is more likely to be spam) to a SOFTFAIL (~all) than a FAIL (-all), even though this contrary to the spec.

Spamassassin's rationale was that many of the tutorials online never explained the difference, so the majority of mailservers were just using SOFTFAIL everywhere. More paradoxically, messages that had a hard FAIL result were statistically more likely to be due to a misconfiguration, based on an empirical analysis.

Like I said though, it's been quite a while since I've had to deal with this. I'm not sure if it's still true or not.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#138

Post by RIMR »

Anyone else wondering why JWZ feels the need to complain when he is clearly using Gmail in a way that Google advises you not to?

If he wants to use Gmail for his business he needs to get Google Apps. Having your employees use their personal e-mail accounts for business is completely unprofessional.

Why even bother running an in-house mail server if all it does is forward e-mails? Cut the costs and pay for the services Google offers for business and get your employees more focused by keeping them off their personal e-mail on the job.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#139

Post by hudell »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #54
hudell wrote: post #44

And to make it worst: Google don't run filters on messages that goes to the spam folders, so you can't even use that. I always wanted to do the opposite: Run a filter on the spam folder to delete emails that I know for sure that really are spam, so I wouldn't need to delete them manually.

I'm not sure what you mean; do you mean that their search bar doesn't include spam filters? (I assume that's what you mean since filter creation is sort of built into the search bar.)

You can search in the spam folder, but some filter actions won't run on messages that are there.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#140

Post by microtonal »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #135
microtonal wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's hard to me to recommend anything other than GMail to people There are other companies that offer e-mail services, without the embrace, expand, and extinguish strategy that Google seems to follow these days.

I haven't checked the new Outlook recently; maybe it's good. But all others that I know offer subpar service and honestly, look like crap. UX is important. For example, I cringe whenever someone makes me to use Roundcube-based webmail.

Fastmail has a nice UI, is fast, contributes to the open source Cyrus IMAP service (among other projects) and has business accounts.
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