This is complicated and geeky, but I’ll try to explain this in a way most of you can “get” it. You already have a problem if you automatically “forward” your email from an address like Newsletters [at] YourOwnDomain.com to, say, GMail.
Back in the days when we got our email addresses from your ISP — some might remember my arcie used to be at netcom.com — we realized that it might be nice to have an address that could be re-pointed, in case you switched ISPs; the company POBox.com sprung up to help, among many others. Of course then there was Yahoo Mail, and then GMail, and others, free or not.
There are two main things that many of these companies can do with your incoming mail: 1) provide a mailbox, to where you set up a mailer app like Outlook or Thunderbird to connect, log in, and download your mail, or 2) forward your mail to somewhere else that does have a mailbox for you to read it from.
That was very, very popular, that forwarding thing. Not anymore.
Spammers Messed It Up for You
You don’t want to use forwarders anymore. The why has to do with the fraternal triplets, SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance), and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail).
First, all this complicated stuff is a good thing because 1) it protects you from enormous amounts of spam, and 2) it greatly, but not completely, protects me from being accused of being a spammer.
I’m not going to go into the technical details of what those all are; if you want an overview, you can get overviews from Wikipedia:
- SPF specifies who is allowed to send from a domain name (e.g., thisistrue.com).
- DMARC specifies what recipient servers should do with mail that fails the SPF rules (and also allows senders to get feedback on some percentage of the mail that is handled by a recipient server, if the recipient supports that).
- DKIM is a cryptographic signing mechanism for email to prove the mail was sent by an authorized server.
Thisistrue.com has SPF, DMARC, and DKIM set up to tell big mailbox providers, such as Yahoo and Gmail and many others, how to tell if a message really is from thisistrue.com. The “set of rules” say, for instance, that my list provider, Aweber, is allowed to send mail “from” thisistrue.com even though their servers are sending that message from something.aweber.com.
The rules also say that thisistrue.com itself might use this or that I.P. address, which are allowed to send mail for thisistrue.com; it doesn’t take a server’s “word” for it that it’s a thisistrue.com server, it checks. Every time.
“Aweber is allowed” or “coming from a listed thisistrue.com server” gives the mailbox provider confidence that the message is something you want, not spam, and it all happens in a tiny fraction of a second, millions or even billions of times per minute, all over the world. And we all do this because to fight off spammers. [You have seen my Spam Primer, right?]
Here’s Why Forwarding is Now Broken
OK, so you sign up to get mail from True and put in your forwarding address, tommy [at] tommy2forward.xyz, which automatically forwards the newsletter to your real mailbox at GMail. Then a newsletter comes out, bounces through your forwarder, and arrives at your GMail mailbox, which looks at it: it says it’s “from” thisistrue.com, it checks to see what servers are allowed to send mail for thisistrue.com, and it makes a discovery:
tommy2forward.xyz is definitely NOT an allowed sender for thisistrue.com!
So what does GMail then DO? First, it looks at what thisistrue.com suggests: the choices are do nothing, “quarantine” it (e.g., put it in the folder called “spam”), or reject it completely. Since I send tens of thousands of emails per week, my directive is “reject”.
This is a very good thing for me, since it makes the thisistrue.com domain a terrible domain for spammers to use, because they know they can’t pass the checks outlined in the rules: their garbage can’t get through by dressing up as thisistrue.com mail.
GMail and other large inbox providers — the smart ones, at least — gather data to thwart spammers, and they “notice” these things. That gives mailers like me “points” on the plus side, indications that our mail is actually wanted, not spam. It’s not foolproof, as all of these companies have very complex rulesets to make the spam/not spam decision, but the positive “points” help.
But meanwhile, forwarded mail is left out in the cold because GMail, Yahoo, and many other giant mailbox providers have started to enforce adherence to what mail senders say to do in our rules, what we set up — the “Quarantine” or “Reject” directives, and they are allowed to escalate (Nothing to Quarantine, or Quarantine to Reject, or even Nothing to Reject) as they wish because, after all, they “own” the mailbox.
(Hint: you don’t own your own mailbox unless it’s your domain and your server; then it’s up to you …or your server’s hardware provider, or your server’s ISP.)
But what happens if senders like me (or you!) don’t set up those rulesets to take ownership of our mail? That is counted as negative points, making it much less likely for the message to get through. Don’t worry: mail “from” your own GMail (or Yahoo or…) address will pass these rules if you send via them, because those companies “sign” the mail they send from addresses they provide. But that won’t work if you “fake” the from address and relay mail through a different server. That is just another form of forwarding.
So, while email forwarding used to be handy, today they will cause legitimate emails to be filtered as spam.
The Switch is Already Flipped
As noted, Yahoo/GMail/etc. have already started this enforcement. Forwarders are already mostly unusable. If you’re using them, and find you are missing mail, that’s a big reason why.
What can you do if you are using a forwarder? LOG IN to your forwarding provider and see what your options are. It IS possible for forwarding to work if they change the headers to take responsibility for the email. It might be a True newsletter, but now it comes “from” your forwarding company (ick! I didn’t say it’s a pretty workaround).
Much better: see what the company you use has in the way of options. For instance, it could switch you from a Forwarder to a Mailbox — accept the mail — and then you have to use your software to “go get it” directly from there.
You can also set up, for instance, GMail to “go get it” for you: GMail → “settings” gear → See All Settings → Accounts and Import → Check mail from other accounts. The cool thing about this is, GMail will then run through all the validations and spam checks for you as if it had received the message directly.
What to Do Instead
Bottom line, if you want your email, don’t use a forwarder, use an address with an actual mailbox so there is no bounce in the middle. If you signed up with a forwarding address for This is True newsletters, you need to change your address immediately.
To what? Directly to your address that has an actual mailbox.
Extra Geeky Part: If you do forwarding from your own domain, you want to immediately stop using them for everything. Why? Because they also forward any spam received. That makes your domain a spam-sending server and gets your domain and/or I.P. address onto blacklists, which means your legitimate mail will have a harder time being delivered. That can get you booted from a server provider too.
Forwarders are a thing of the past. Move on.
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