Mail bouncing to gmail

[#1]

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@sunnyrio wrote:

"Simply" move to another email provider?  No, no, and thrice no.  Changing email address is like moving house, I've somehow got to find the hundreds and hundreds of companies, forums, friends, etc that know my email address and change it with them.  This a monumental task.  If you remove my email service, I will leave.  Immediately.

And for you to suggest gmail, the very service which as discussed above is badly broken, is beyond absurd.  Goodbye and good riddance.

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I don’t think that there’s any need for the aggressive responses . Everyone who has responded so far, including myself, are fellow customers who try to help and advise.

If the email service is withdrawn and you decide to leave then that of course is your decision, but you will still have to face up to the same fact that you will lose your email address.

Gmail is not badly broken as literally millions of users will confirm. If emails are being rejected due to SPF or DKIM issues it will be due to your sent emails probably failing to meet settings that meet the gmail spam filter threshold .requirements.

[#2]

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@Baldrick1 wrote:

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Gmail is not badly broken as literally millions of users will confirm. If emails are being rejected due to SPF or DKIM issues it will be due to your sent emails probably failing to meet settings that meet the gmail spam filter threshold .requirements.

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Kind of agree, @Baldrick1 , but as Townman has pointed out many times, Gmail policy is in contravention of various RFC's &c.

[#3]

Yikes, 12 pages of people not knowing what the problem is.   Like with them, gmail randomly objects to 50% of my emails, which is weird.  The server response doesn't say what's wrong.  I guess gmail remains something to avoid.  I have told my friends to get a proper email service....  Free things just don't work.

[#4]

I'm not being aggressive, I'm being annoyed Plusnet and Gmail are wasting my time.  If Plusnet removes the email service, I'll sign up to the paid Protonmail, which has good reviews.  This costs £5 a month.  If Plusnet give me a £5 a month discount for the portion of their service they removed, then I will stay, otherwise I will leave.

[#5]

They're not marked as spam.  They're marked as the authentication being wrong.  Looking that up on Gmail forums, they direct me to change the settings on the actual email server, which isn't mine, it's Plusnet's.  I can't change the settings on something which isn't my property.  I don't know if Gmail is wrong or Plusnet is wrong, but the two of them disagree on what the authentication should be.  And weirdly only 50% of the time!

[#6]

I don't recall the full details of that long, old, topic, but I'm sure Townman will have been in at some point and advised that Gmail are not following industry agreed standards/protocols over this.

Irrespective of what Gmail say on their forums, it is them that are at fault for not following those standards/protocols, and sending servers do not need reconfiguring - they - Gmail - need to follow procedure.

[#7 · Accepted solution]

The problem is that we dont know (and gmail wont say) exactly what they are doing.

As has been said earlier, SPF & DKIM are NOT mandatory.

What I SUSPECT gmail is doing, is using SPF & DKIM as part of spam detection, so lack of (or incorrect) SPF/DKIM is weighting an associated email as possible spam. Dependant on the spam score of the actual message it MAY get tipped over the limit by SPF/DKIM assesments.

What they definitely should NOT be doing is reporting the failure as being directly due to SPF/DKIM failure but that's probably due to poorly worded error messaging

[#8]

MisterW's assessment looks correct.  It happens when I'm sending a reply to a long conversation with links in it, which would look more like spam than a simple fresh message.  I shall avoid gmail myself.

[#9]

It MAY be correct, it may NOT😀. It is just one possible explanation for what gmail are doing.

Without details from gmail themselves (with which they're not likely to be forthcoming) we cant be sure...

[#10]

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@sunnyrio wrote:

MisterW's assessment looks correct.  It happens when I'm sending a reply to a long conversation with links in it, which would look more like spam than a simple fresh message.  I shall avoid gmail myself.

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That is the exact same assessment which has been shared many times on this forum ... which earlier on you sought to dismiss because Gmail has millions of users ... so Gmail must know what they are doing!  If you care to search for and find Gmail's own statements and support guidance on SPF, you will see that they make clear that (in the SPF space) "~all" is a soft fail which SHOULD NOT lead to the receipt of the email being rejected.

On the basis that your emails are being sent from you@youraccount.plus.com via relay.plus.net then the SPF policy is none and thus correct SPF processing should be soft-fail no rejection with an optional "this could be spam" advisory.

If you have a domain name hosted by Plusnet, you can get a SPF record inserted for that domain name.

If you are sending using some other domain name (belonging to a different provider) then you should use their relay SMTP server, not PlusNet's.  Yes, we have seen the exact same compliant where a user is sending as me@some_other_domain.com via relay.plus.net and wondering why such fails the SPF rules.

Sorry that this does not fit the agenda that Plusnet is wrong and totally rubbish.  You might care to go ask Gmail why they are breaking the recognised standards for SPF processing ... and indeed their own support statements on how this should be handled.

[#11]

I wasn't aware of ever siding with Gmail in here.  I've said Plusnet shouldn't be removing their email service, but I've never blamed them for the not being able to send problem.

It isn't making them bounce, it's making them more likely to be marked as spam (even though the reject message doesn't say that).  I've found if I make the emails to gmail users look more "normal", they always get through.  As in.... don't send to more than one address (4 of us were having a conversation).  Trim out quotations, especially if there are links.

You mention domain names with Plusnet.  If they were to stop their email service, does that mean I can rent my current domain name from Plusnet  and run my own email server and keep the address?  I'm sure I could mange to set one up, I did it once at my work 10 years ago for an internal system, and I've got a Squid Proxy running here, and I set up an Apache web server once.

[#12]

Getting hold of youraccount.plus.com is an interesting idea which no-one has yet mentioned.  It is a good question, but I suspect zero chance.

If you have a personal domain name hosted by Plusnet, that can be moved to where ever you want at any time.

Since the previous post, I have noted that globalnet.co.uk does have a SPF policy ... I will add that to my query with Plusnet support.

In the midst of reviewing this thread I read a "Gmail cannot be wrong with this, they have so many users..." statement - it might have been in a link.  Please accept my apologies for implying it was your statement.

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@sunnyrio wrote:

It isn't making them bounce, it's making them more likely to be marked as spam (even though the reject message doesn't say that).  I've found if I make the emails to gmail users look more "normal", they always get through.  As in.... don't send to more than one address (4 of us were having a conversation).  Trim out quotations, especially if there are links.

The title of the topic suggests that emails ARE being bounced by Gmail citing SPF/DKIM which exactly fits the historic experience with Gmail ... which (if it has concern over SPF validity) should indeed mark such emails as potentially being SPAM ... unless SOME OTHER factor confirms that they are probably SPAM.

Marking email as potentially being SPAM and bouncing them because they "soft fail" SPF checking are country miles apart.

[#13]

Whilst thinking further on the last post ... youraccount.plus.com cannot be treated (managed) distinctly from plus.com so is in fact a non-starter.

I do though have a different idea, which I have floated elsewhere.

[#14]

So if I buy a domain name from Plusnet, what does it look like?  Why can I not buy username.plus.com?

Yes, Gmail is using the SPF to add to the possible spam score.  From experience anything remotely dodgy like lots of links and/or sending to multiple recipients also adds to that score.  Hence SPF is tipping the detector balance when normally such emails would manage to get through with a high score but not high enough to be marked as spam.

Not sure why gmail is so popular - even with small companies.  Local joiners for example with companyname@gmail.com looks very unprofessional.  For goodness sake it's only £10 a year to buy your own domain.  sales@companyname.co.uk looks way better on the back of your van.

[#15]

username.plus.com is not a domain name - at best it might be considered a sub-domain name, it is rather a hostname (server name) within the domain plus.com.  See Domain name - Wikipedia

I really did think that you were on to something until I thought about it a bit more carefully!

Gmail - completely agree - all looks very unprofessional (turns me off doing business with such) however I suspect that the majority of people do not understand the concept of having one's own "professional" looking domain name.  Add to that so many people not willing to learn and understand ... what they do not (want to?) understand and we get what we have!

Gmail and spam assessment - if all that Gmail was doing was being very conservative on spam risk scoring, that would not be so bad, but (as per your title) Gmail has been bouncing emails SOFT FAILING on SPF checking - which is fundamentally wrong.