Emails To Gmail Being Bounced

[#1]

Any email I send to a Gmail account (anyone@gmail.com) are being bounced as undeliverable this evening.

Has PlusNet been blacklisted for some reason again? Perhaps an PN admin could look into it?

[#2]

And now it’s OK again!

How weird - I tried emailing several accounts over the space of half an hour and all the gmail ones bounced but now I’ve tried again and they went through OK.

ah well …….

[#3]

Indeed Gmail is a shocking mess!

Will email get through to Gmail can be something of a lottery - they are certainly making it difficult to send email to their free email accounts.  There have been no reports of issues sending email to business / paid for Gmail accounts.

Are you sending from you@youraccount.plus.com or from you@yourdomain.co.uk ?  If the latter, this might help...

Configuring SPF on hosted domains

Some email service providers (notably Gmail) have mandated the SPF & DKIM (which are non-mandatory RFCs) on other email providers, such as Plusnet. This can bring about significant difficulty when attempting to send emails from one's own domain name (e.g. me@mydomain.me.uk) to 'gmail.com addresses.

SPF configuration is facilitated by the addition of a TXT record in the domain's DNS settings. Plusnet's DNS configuration tool for hosted domains does not permit the creation of TXT records. However, there is an unsupported "facilitation" which will create an SPF record for a hosted domain.

On the basis that your account ALREADY has a hosted domain, go to Manage Account -> Manage Your Domains -> Configure domain name ... and create an "Additional DNS records (Advanced)" as follows...

[#4]

@quelquod  Were the emails bounced or just being delayed ?

I wonder if Google email servers are using greylisting as a method to reduce spam.

[#5]

They were bounced. The reply diagnostic was this:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.      

Delivery to the following recipients failed permanently:

  * destinationaddress@gmail.com

Reason: A message that you sent to the following recipient could not be delivered due to a permanent error. ** The remote server ?? responded with: ** destinationaddress@gmail.com ??:?? This message was created automatically by mail delivery software on the server .

[#6]

@Townman yes - sending from my own hosted domain. I tried the additional dns record per your suggestion but (tonight at any rate) it caused emails to gmail to be bounced whereas without it things are presently OK again. Ah well ….. 😶