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SPF has another problem. I sent an email to someone recently @theirdomain.com. I subsequently saw by chance that the email was rejected because they were hostin

SPF has another problem. I sent an email to someone recently @theirdomain.com. I subsequently saw by chance that the email was rejected because they were hosting @theirdomain.com with a random ISP but they had configured the mail to be forwarded to a mailbox in @gmail.com. Gmail sees the email coming from @theirdomain.com's servers, rather than my server. Gmail checks the SPF record which doesn't match, and it rejects it. I understand that this style of forwarding is anyway bad because gmail see's all email the user receives @theirdomain.com as coming from those servers, not their true origin. If @theirdomain.com receives (and forwards) any spam, it looks like a spammer to gmail.

hackuser 10y ago
Gmail needs to adjust to reality, not vice versa.
mwpmaybe 10y ago
The solution to this is SRS[0], but yes, not every mail-forwarder implements this (correctly), and it seems to break DKIM. The good news is that an SPF soft-fail and a DKIM pass usually means a DMARC pass. More information here[1]. 0. http://www.openspf.org/SRS http://www.openspf.org/SRS 1. https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/24/spf-dkim-dmarc/ https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/24/spf-dkim-dmarc/
- jlgaddis 10y ago
  Even with SRS, the "reputation" of the "middleman" (from Google's perspective) still suffers.