[xyzzy]

I've been a member of a professional organization (ACM - Association of Computing Machinery) that supports a forwarding service. I've been using that forwarding service for almost 30 years. I simply tell the service to relay all incoming email sent to my forwarding service to my FM account and the From is the forwarding service address. There's been no need for me to create a personal domain because that service was always there no matter which email service I happened to use. After all these years my forwarding service's address is my public known address (spammed too but I handle that).

Recently (I think in the last couple of months but not exactly sure of the timing) all email I send to other recipients using my forwarding service address as the From address are being filtered into the recipient's spam (or junk) folder. It never used to be that way. I sent a ticket to Fastmail. They theorize...

For some context here, Google and other large email providers have recently updated their "Email sender guidelines" (as discussed by Google in this article on their website), with the result being that many email providers are now enforcing a stricter set of authentication requirements.

I can see that your <censored>@acm.org> is an external sending address, but that it's set up to send via Fastmail's sending servers. Since this address is external, and not authenticated in Fastmail, it won't pass the various authentication checks (e.g. DKIM and SPF) now required by Google and other services. As a result, mail sent from this address in Fastmail will very likely be filtered into your recipients' spam folders, as you've observed.

I've tested this by sending email to gmail, yahoo mail, outlook, zoho, gmx, and mail.com. They all filter my test messages into their spam. It never used to.

It seems to me that these tightened rules makes using a forwarding service next to useless unless all you want is for receive only. Effectively that's what I now see.

FastMail also included in their reply the following:

However, since the acm.org belongs to the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery), changing the DNS records is unlikely to be an available option for you here. This leaves only the other option, of using an external sending server, as a possible solution here.

One of their services they provide is a email forwarding service

May I ask if you know whether the ACM provide an SMTP server for sending mail from their addresses?

You mention that their service is a forwarding service, and while not many forwarding services provide an SMTP server to send through (via a username and password), some do. If you're unsure, it may be worth reaching out to ACM to see if this is something that they offer.

Can't see anything on the ACM website but I'll try calling tomorrow.

If they do have a sending server you can use, please do let me know and I'll be happy to provide further guidance on how you can set up your address in Fastmail to use it.

Unfortunately, outside of sending through an ACM approved sending server, there's not much else you can do on your end to ensure these messages aren't filtered into spam folders.

I'm sorry for any inconvenience this causes.

That's an understatement!

Of course the ACM email address is always going to be good for mail forwarded to me (I think all my rules and Sieve code override those ending up in spam - didn't check). But it's going to be a little confusing for mail I send when the From will have a different email address than the one I've been using for all these years. Recipient can't just reply. At least I can do this on the fly as they occur. Maybe it is time for getting a personal domain. Of course I assume all the "good" email addresses are already taken.