Gmail thinks messagingengine.com is spam

[FredOnline]

Originally Posted by bbbc

Per Fastmail's warning banner, I fixed the SPF and DKIM for my domain

I hadn't seen this banner before, apparently it's new.

This conversation on Twitter was interesting:

https://twitter.com/wrl/status/1514786627838644226

To summarize, the problem was addressed by Ricardo Signes (Fastmail CTO) - he pointed out errors in the SPF and DKIM records, and then stated:

In theory "your DKIM is messed up" is often no problem. But it's more of a problem lately

I'm assuming that this 'problem' is to do with Gmail but, as far as I'm aware, Fastmail hasn't shared any further information publicly.

[ioneja]

Originally Posted by silverwolff

That's 13 days, almost 2 weeks, from me reporting the problem to a solution.

Originally Posted by ioneja

I've personally never had truly *bad* service from them (that I can recall, it's been many years), but my queries might have been easier to answer. However, I've also never had *spectacular* service from them either, and if this was a mission-critical business email situation and I had a huge time gap like that on something important, I'd probably have given up and migrated away to another service.

Quoting my previous response to silverwolf, ironically, I now find myself in a similar position over an important related issue, and Fastmail is responding slowly after a quick first response. I think the first response came in about 2 hours later. Pretty good. But the level of deductive reasoning or attention span of the first tier support staff was lacking and I had to provide duplicate information, as if he hadn't actually read my support ticket and realized I already answered his question, so that didn't inspire confidence. Then it seems like if the first tier support people can't help you immediately, you then get escalated into a very slow higher-tier support system, which is starting to drag on with no progress. I'm on day 4 or 5 so far and it's not going to work for me any longer. I was hoping it would be resolved by now but Monday morning is essential, which I'm skeptical will happen at this pace, so I better start the domain migration to cover myself for Monday.

In my experience over the years, they are good people there at Fastmail, but things need to be resolved more quickly for issues like this. In this case, I'm going to follow my own advice and move a business domain out of Fastmail because it's taking too long to resolve. Sadly, I'll think very carefully before hosting business-related emails at Fastmail again. I still think it's fine for personal/family email, but some issues are too important to have this kind of turnaround time.

[trikotret]

Originally Posted by ioneja

Quoting my previous response to silverwolf, ironically, I now find myself in a similar position over an important related issue, and Fastmail is responding slowly after a quick first response. I think the first response came in about 2 hours later. Pretty good. But the level of deductive reasoning or attention span of the first tier support staff was lacking and I had to provide duplicate information, as if he hadn't actually read my support ticket and realized I already answered his question, so that didn't inspire confidence. Then it seems like if the first tier support people can't help you immediately, you then get escalated into a very slow higher-tier support system, which is starting to drag on with no progress. I'm on day 4 or 5 so far and it's not going to work for me any longer. I was hoping it would be resolved by now but Monday morning is essential, which I'm skeptical will happen at this pace, so I better start the domain migration to cover myself for Monday.

In my experience over the years, they are good people there at Fastmail, but things need to be resolved more quickly for issues like this. In this case, I'm going to follow my own advice and move a business domain out of Fastmail because it's taking too long to resolve. Sadly, I'll think very carefully before hosting business-related emails at Fastmail again. I still think it's fine for personal/family email, but some issues are too important to have this kind of turnaround time.

What issues are you having?

[silverwolff]

Originally Posted by ioneja

Quoting my previous response to silverwolf, ironically, I now find myself in a similar position over an important related issue... so I better start the domain migration to cover myself for Monday.

What is the issue you're having? Also, where are you moving your email hosting to?

[ioneja]

Originally Posted by trikotret

What issues are you having?

Originally Posted by silverwolff

What is the issue you're having? Also, where are you moving your email hosting to?

A series of minor issues over time that grew in irritation until I wanted to do something about it, inspired, in part, by this thread

Slightly more detail: there were some recent deliverability issues I had (coupled with occasional mysterious prior deliverability that didn't make sense before), so I decided to finally go through my domains hosted at Fastmail and test/diagnose what was really happening so I could write a really detailed ticket for Fastmail and solve it once and for all. Hopefully. That was the plan.

There were some other minor things I was going to mention in a second ticket as well.

However, as I was putting together my notes and testing things out, I stumbled into yet another issue with a change I wanted to make to one of my domains. Long story, but in the past, I have been able to add/delete/edit domains without a problem for years, with DNS at FM, and DNS external to FM, so there's no mystery there. But this time something wasn't working like it normally does, and I sent in a ticket just on this one (little) issue, thinking I could get a swift resolution. I hadn't even finished my big report to them of my deliverability issues.

But now I'm stuck in ticket purgatory.

And since I needed things working correctly by Monday morning (yesterday) before work started, and my confidence in Fastmail was slipping, and because I didn't want to risk any other weirdness, plus I just *assumed* Fastmail was NOT going to get back in touch with me in time, I took my own advice to silverwolff and decided to start migrating out.

And BTW my assumption was correct. No further contact so far.

And at this point I don't care. Sadly, the good will I had towards them from my years of relatively good experience is basically dried up. I've 100% ruled them out for business use, unless they radically improve their customer support turnaround time. This is way too long for me, personally, and I hadn't even sent them my primary reason of deliverability yet. Who knows how long THAT ticket would have taken? What a waste of my time.

I *might* keep a personal account at Fastmail for a while longer since it's just too much hassle to completely move everything out right now, but depends on how I feel later this week. I might just migrate everything sooner rather than later. I have family and friends at Fastmail as well, so that will be an interesting discussion if they bring this up wondering why I'm phasing out Fastmail.

And I don't even know what I'd say to Fastmail if/when they eventually do get back to me. Probably, "Thank you, but sorry, it's too late. I migrated out. Wish you the best of luck."

So this weekend I already moved a key domain name out, so I could at least have confidence in an important domain by Monday morning for clients without this hanging over me.

But again, it doesn't really matter now, I'm not going to bother following up with Fastmail now, I'm over it and moving on. I'm just going through the steps to be done.

As for what email provider am I migrating to? I'm a fan of having several email providers -- in part just to cover myself if something like this happens -- and so I'll be splitting up the duties that Fastmail previously had among some other providers. For starters, I moved partly to Mailfence so far, but I'll be splitting among the typical mentions here in the forum. I'm a fan of Startmail, Runbox (although Runbox has been having their own problems lately!), ProtonMail, etc. I might even see how Rollernet is doing. And I might take another look at how Hey.com is doing. They had some internal staff issues last year, but perhaps they're in great shape now. Worth looking at again.

In any case, best of wishes to Fastmail, I know they're good people, but they really need to get this customer support thing figured out, not to mention some of these other issues like deliverability in some cases, and weird glitches with their system. Maybe less time working on adding bells and whistles to their webmail, and more time working on making sure the underlying service is working perfectly. Over and out.

Cheers and best wishes to the forum members.

[TenFour]

Unfortunately, I went through a similar process with Fastmail to what is described above. I just took a look back at many emails back and forth and I didn't receive any sort of response within the 24-hour time frame. Finally after a week of fruitless customer service purgatory I gave up and stopped using Fastmail. This was about a year ago, so maybe things have changed.

[soromak]

Originally Posted by TenFour

Microsoft for Business is notorious for this. I use it at work and have to check my Junk folder every day, and every day there are important emails there. Even some of our own internal emails sent through Microsoft 365 within the organization go into the Junk folders of users. You can whitelist, mark as Not Junk, do whatever you want, and it doesn't make one bit of difference. Microsoft 365 filters have a mind of their own.

I would blame your admin for the setup. I use one o365 setup as my work account (cannot configure too much there) and one O365 for developers where I am an admin myself and where I host my personal domain (previously at FM).
So far over 2+ years I have little to complain about the spam filters. And if you use the reporting plugin/add-in, not just mark spam or not spam in outlook it affects the false positive/false negatives rates. But you need to download/activate this add in yourself, unless it is deployed by your admin already. Works both in desktop outlook, outlook on the mobile device and in outlook on the web. And with some training of focused inbox, I really handle my messages quite efficiently.
And in addition, majority of my contacts now (research, academia, and some smaller and larger, in fact some large industrial companies) are using office 365 now so it does help with delivery of messages.

[TenFour]

And if you use the reporting plugin/add-in, not just mark spam or not spam in outlook it affects the false positive/false negatives rates. But you need to download/activate this add in yourself, unless it is deployed by your admin already.

Yes, but out of the box consumer Gmail and Google Workspace for business handle spam perfectly--no setup required. I experience the same problem with a consumer-grade Outlook.com account too, and experienced the same problem at several other places of employment where we used Microsoft's email services, including an email service provider where we had an entire IT team. We used Microsoft's stuff for our own internal use even though we had our own email platform. Sometimes emails from the CEO of our company went into Junk.

[aoeuaoeu]

Originally Posted by FredOnline

I hadn't seen this banner before, apparently it's new.

This conversation on Twitter was interesting:

https://twitter.com/wrl/status/1514786627838644226

To summarize, the problem was addressed by Ricardo Signes (Fastmail CTO) - he pointed out errors in the SPF and DKIM records, and then stated:



I'm assuming that this 'problem' is to do with Gmail but, as far as I'm aware, Fastmail hasn't shared any further information publicly.

I don't understand the whole 'banner' talk. Would one of you kind readers please post a screenshot..or a link..or instructions? Thank you!

[FredOnline]

Originally Posted by aoeuaoeu

I don't understand the whole 'banner' talk. Would one of you kind readers please post a screenshot..or a link..or instructions? Thank you!

I assume you've not seen the banner is because your DKIM records are correct, apparently the banner shows up when, composing, you select the sending address at a domain that has the incorrect record.

I suppose, to try yourself, you could amend the DKIM record so it should error.

[aoeuaoeu]

Originally Posted by FredOnline

I assume you've not seen the banner is because your DKIM records are correct, apparently the banner shows up when, composing, you select the sending address at a domain that has the incorrect record.

I suppose, to try yourself, you could amend the DKIM record so it should error.

Thank you, FredOnline!

[ioneja]

Originally Posted by ioneja

I now find myself in a similar position over an important related issue, and Fastmail is responding slowly after a quick first response....

So quick follow-up to close out my recent experience... Fastmail DID eventually get back to me and resolved the issue, however, it took about two weeks, and I had already migrated all my email out of that account. I left the account open just to see how long it would actually take for a resolution, but now I can finally close it and be done with them for business email.

Two weeks is unacceptable for any kind of business email support scenario (or really any support scenario that has to do with email, that's just WAY too long for something so important IMO), so I'm over and out with Fastmail. Hope they can fix their support process, but I'm completely done with them in theory, and I say "in theory" just because it will take more time to migrate out my *personal* account.

Unfortunately, I still have too many old personal aliases on Fastmail's domains (warning to all and reminder to my future self about vendor lock-in!) that will take me a while to migrate out. I haven't always been consistent in the past about using my own domains for aliases, so now I'm kicking myself that I have so many old aliases stuck in Fastmail. I don't even remember what some of them were connected to, so I have to spend time investigating!

So I will migrate them all out over time, but for now, I'm looking at my Fastmail subscription fee as a maintenance cost for my own lack of foresight with using their domains for aliases. I don't know how long it will take me to research and move all those aliases over to domains I own, but eventually I'll wrap it all up. Getting my business email out of Fastmail was my first order of business, and that's all done.

Anyway, good luck to everyone. I still like the people over at Fastmail, and the service has some great features, but all that doesn't matter if when something goes wrong, it takes two weeks to resolve it. I just can't risk (or support or pay for) a service with that slow of customer service when things were important to me to get done more quickly on an important service like email. Cheers to all, my long-time Fastmail journey is winding down and I'm finally moving on.

[TenFour]

Unfortunately, I still have too many old personal aliases on Fastmail's domains (warning to all and reminder to my future self about vendor lock-in!) that will take me a while to migrate out. I haven't always been consistent in the past about using my own domains for aliases, so now I'm kicking myself that I have so many old aliases stuck in Fastmail. I don't even remember what some of them were connected to, so I have to spend time investigating!

I think this is one of the problems with creating aliases on the fly for each place that needs an email address. Even if they are on your own domain you can't remember after awhile all of them, so when you migrate to some other service you have to have a "catch-all" set up to accept any address to your domain. That is a recipe to receive spam and phishing emails. Maybe creating all these aliases is important for some people that get tons of email, but in my experience with a Gmail address that has been used for over 16 years I doubt it is a benefit to the average person if you use a service with decent spam and phishing filters. For that matter, I run a small business, and the same email addresses for some things have been out there since email became available and even they only receive a little spam that isn't caught by Microsoft's filters. Easily handled. Microsoft and Google are both pretty good about eliminating addresses you report as spam too.

[ioneja]

Originally Posted by TenFour

I think this is one of the problems with creating aliases on the fly for each place that needs an email address. Even if they are on your own domain you can't remember after awhile all of them, so when you migrate to some other service you have to have a "catch-all" set up to accept any address to your domain.

Yes, indeed it can be a pain in the neck, but I think having lots of aliases is definitely worth the hassle for those that need/want that kind of workflow. My own challenge is that, like so many of us here in this forum, my own needs and strategies (and risk assessments) have evolved/shifted or at least become more clear over the years, and coupled with my lack of consistency in some cases (ahhhhhh!!!!), I have been surprised to see the mess of aliases I have created on FM's domains. I didn't keep good track of them in the past, which was really dumb of me, so it *turned into* a problem that I didn't know about. Simple management of the aliases, with some quick notes about why I created them in some spreadsheet or document would have solved this self-inflicted problem. (BTW FM now has a little optional "description" field associated with each alias, which I think was a new-ish feature that I only realized was there recently.)

In the case of my business domains, that's more or less what I've been doing, so I have fairly decent notes on most of my business aliases on my business domains because they are usually tied with something important I have to track. Contrast that to my personal aliases on FM's domains, which are more on the "throwaway" side of aliases, and I was unfortunately kind of sloppy about it in some cases so I can't be 100% sure... there could be important things in there I have to track down.

This whole situation has allowed me to do some much needed email housekeeping, and eventually I'll be in very good shape.

As for sticking with a few main email addresses with a service like Google or Microsoft, that's all fine if you trust Google or Microsoft, which I don't. I also prefer to separate out contact information, keep cross-vendor/site profiling to a minimum, and use several services for different purposes or security models based on clients/purpose. So if Google or Microsoft work for you, great, but it definitely doesn't work in my scenario. But each person has their own needs and preferences, etc., and I understand your POV and it would work for many people. And I certainly won't fault Google's handling of spam, it's pretty good, but I am *personally* opposed to using Google for many other reasons, which is a different discussion.

Anyway, my problem with too many aliases on FM's domains is a good lesson and reminder to me to keep things more organized, and focused on my own domains when possible.

BTW, I've been pretty happy with SimpleLogin so far, which has taken *some* of the load off the business domains/stuff that I used to host with Fastmail. SimpleLogin has really good alias management IMO... and each alias can have its own notes, contacts, and other good granular control per alias. Pretty neat actually, and they support unlimited domains with their paid account. I've been adding some domains there in recent days and it's been really cool so far. It's not the only solution of its kind of course, but it is a useful tool if you want to manage lots of aliases on your own domains. We'll see how it goes, but eventually I'll migrate all my old FM aliases over to my own domains, then I can shuffle them around to different providers if needed. If SimpleLogin remains solid for me, they'll likely pick up a number of FM's old alias duties. Cheers!

[TenFour]

BTW, I've been pretty happy with SimpleLogin so far, which has taken *some* of the load off the business domains/stuff that I used to host with Fastmail. SimpleLogin has really good alias management IMO... and each alias can have its own notes, contacts, and other good granular control per alias. Pretty neat actually, and they support unlimited domains with their paid account. I've been adding some domains there in recent days and it's been really cool so far. It's not the only solution of its kind of course, but it is a useful tool if you want to manage lots of aliases on your own domains. We'll see how it goes, but eventually I'll migrate all my old FM aliases over to my own domains, then I can shuffle them around to different providers if needed. If SimpleLogin remains solid for me, they'll likely pick up a number of FM's old alias duties. Cheers!

One thing I keep in the back of my mind, being of a certain age, is how easy it will be for someone to come in cold and be able to make sense of my digital life, including email addresses, once I am gone. I don't want to leave a frustrating puzzle behind. A close friend passed a few years ago and his wife is still sorting out his affairs, and part of the problem was all sorts of undocumented digital stuff. For example, she had to get court orders to be able to access some bank accounts.