Are all forwarding services now useless?

[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.

[Avion]

I'm sorry for any inconvenience this causes.

Originally Posted by xyzzy

That's an understatement!

To be fair to Fastmail, they haven't caused the problem, despite their apology.

Found this: https://myacm.acm.org/dashboard.cfm?svc=mailroute

[TenFour]

Several email forwarding services offer SMTP: Forwardemail, SimpleLogin, and even POBox.com, Fastmail's own service. Others too.

[trikotret]

Originally Posted by TenFour

Several email forwarding services offer SMTP: Forwardemail, SimpleLogin, and even POBox.com, Fastmail's own service. Others too.

Actually SimpleLogin doesn't offer SMTP.

[TenFour]

Actually SimpleLogin doesn't offer SMTP.

Well, you can send from your alias addresses using their reverse alias system. Has anyone reported that sending like that from SimpleLogin triggers Gmail to reject? As recently as March I tested it out and it worked fine sending to a Gmail address, but it wasn't an extensive test. In any case, it seems you can still find forwarding services that do offer SMTP. Let's hope Fastmail keeps POBox.com forwarding working!

[trikotret]

Originally Posted by TenFour

Well, you can send from your alias addresses using their reverse alias system. Has anyone reported that sending like that from SimpleLogin triggers Gmail to reject? As recently as March I tested it out and it worked fine sending to a Gmail address, but it wasn't an extensive test. In any case, it seems you can still find forwarding services that do offer SMTP. Let's hope Fastmail keeps POBox.com forwarding working!

I have simplelogin.My emails don't get rejected by gmail.

[xyzzy]

Originally Posted by Avion

Found this: https://myacm.acm.org/dashboard.cfm?svc=mailroute

When I was originally configuring MailRoute's settings (almost all of which are for configuring various spam attributes to be checked) I saw "SMTP Auth Relay" in the list and I thought it was something I could ignore. Now in the current context, and after reading the info about it, I think it may be just what I need. Both send and receive would be the MailRoute servers and that should satisfy all the security checks causing the recipients not to treat the stuff as spam.

MailRoute's "SMTP Auth Relay" documentation specifies the inbound/outbound server settings. This this is just what I need to keep the recipients thinking my messages are spam. Need to figure out how to set this up in my FM account ("My Email Addresses" setting I think).

This looks promising so again thanks.

Stay tuned...

[xyzzy]

Well using MailRoute's "SMTP Auth Relay" worked!

Next is to get my Thunderbird email client to work with this change. No rush for that. At least I now have a channel that works again with my ACM address.

Update the next day:
Turns out no changes need to be made to the client. I think the general sequence of events are that Thunderbird sends using the FM SMTP server as it always has. FM server sees the from address is my ACM email address defined in FM "My email addresses" settings which says send using the MailRoute SMTP server specified for that email address instead. At least I think that's generally how it goes. Whatever. It just works.

[nudge]

A quick look at the DNS for acm.org shows this TXT RR for SPF

"v=spf1 include:_spf.acm_org._d.easydmarc.pro ~all"

this for DMARC

"v=DMARC1;p=reject;rua=mailto:9adb8cf49b@rua.easydmarc.us;ruf=mailto:9adb8cf49b@ruf.easydmarc.us;fo=1"

easydmarc.pro sound like a service for email authentication

anyhow that p=reject means that email that doesn't pass SPF and DKIM is likely to be rejected or quarantined (treated as spam) by receivers.

Maybe your acm.org service is misconfigured (perhaps due to easydmarc) and needs to keep up with the new reality of the email landscape where companies like Google and Yahoo! have recently become stricter.

The above depends on what the domain name of the forwarded mail is. If it's not acm.org then it probably doesn't apply.

Reminds me of ARC (RFC 8617) which is designed for forwarding issues but takes time to get up to speed due to relying on reputation.