I submitted a ticket to Fastmail support regarding this issue 2 about weeks ago. After 3 days I received a reply that my case would be escalated to a senior agent, after another 4 days I received this reply
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Hi Thomas,
As part of our measures to avoid email spoofing we have made some recent changes so that emails sent through domains not added to a fastmail account will be sent through our forwarding server. Since forwarding servers will not be part of our SPF, this can cause SPF softfail and that's what's happening here.
1. You are sending the emails using the domain "mydomain", but that domain is not added to your fastmail account. You need to add the domain from the Settings → Domains screen of your fastmail account. You can add the domain even if its not being hosted at our end.
2. You also need to add the sending address in the Settings → Sending Identities screen if not already done.
Doing both the above will ensure that emails from that address or domain goes through our regular outgoing servers instead of forwarding servers.
If you do not wish to add the domain to your fastmail account and if you have an SMTP host for that domain at a remote server, you can add the sending address as an external identity using the Settings → Sending Identities screen. Please refer to the "Send via" option here: https://www.fastmail.com/help/send/i...s.html#options
However, if you own the domain, for the best possible experience, we always recommend hosting it with us: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/domains.html
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First of all, having to wait a full week for a reply to a ticket is unacceptable even for a free service, never mind a paid one (and I have been a paying customer for 15 years).
Secondly, the reply seems to copied and pasted as it ignores the details I gave when I opened the ticket, namely that my emails were bouncing with a hard SPF fail by some recipient servers. The SPF records for my domains (I have about half a dozen) included spf.messagingengine.com -all and that worked always fine for many years, but since around 20 April all my emails showed hard fail (I only became aware of this a couple of weeks ago when I got a bounce for an important email I wanted so send, but I checked other emails in a backup account which is bcc'd for all emails I sent).
The reply to the ticket at least confirmed what SideShowBob said, namely that they have effectively disabled SPF records for those accounts that have only sending identities for their domains but don't have their domains MX records hosted with them. Now the agent suggested to do the latter, but when I go into my account it says 'Custom domains are not allowed with your current plan. Upgrade to add your own domain.' which would mean I have to upgrade the 'Standard' account costing $50 per year. This is completely unacceptable having had SPF working for all those years for $20 per year (I still have been on the 'Legacy' 'Full' package for the last years, they only recently changed this to the new 'Basic' package for which they'll charge $30 next time anyway.
And by the way, if you want to have DKIM signed for your own domains you have to take out the $50 package as well. Presently they sign it only for their own domain, which isn't really what you want.
I find what Fastmail have done here (without warning) is not only completely unacceptable but but puzzling, because one can add all the servers they use to your SPF record manually
Quote:
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ip4:66.111.4.0/24 ip4:64.147.123.0/24
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This is effectively the same as adding spfall.messagingengine.com, but avoids an additional lookup for the mail servers, and it would still work if Fastmail decided to retire the spfall.messagingengine.com domain. I have changed it in this sense as a temporary measure, but this incident + the fact that the price would increase by 50% for me soon anyway has led me now to look for an alternative email service. Does anyone have experience with Zoho Mail? You can host your domains there and use SPF and DKIM for $10 per year with 5 gb mail storage. I am still waiting for a reply from them how many domains I can use (I contacted them only yesterday though)
Thomas