I'm writing this in the hope that it will be useful for any readers who have a business website and forward emails from that website domain to another email system (e.g. gmail, etc). There is a danger that you can lose emails (and customers!) in this case.
For this example, say you have an email account on gmail.com, outlook.com, etc. I'll use [email protected] as an example. You also have a business website, say tradesman.com, hosted by one of the very many website hosting companies. You have set that up forward emails, e.g. [email protected], to your existing email address, [email protected].
Now say that you have a potential customer who tries to email you from their email address, [email protected].
What you hope will happen is that the email will go from the customer.com mail server to the tradesman.com mail server, and from there to the email.com mail server, where you'll be able to read it.
OK....
So that would have worked without a problem in the past. But there's a problem with scammers who impersonate other people or businesses. In the past, any email server could send a message claiming to be from [email protected], and it would be accepted by the receiving email server. To prevent that there are now protections in place. Specifically, in this case, whitehouse.gov advertises a list of servers that are permitted to send emails "from" whitehouse.gov. A receiving email server will check if the email it has been sent comes from a permitted sending server, and reject it if it doesn't.
This has the collateral effect of breaking some email forwarding.
In the example above, say the customer's email account at customer.com advertises that only customer.com is allowed to send emails "from" customer.com (which seems quite reasonable). Now, the email goes from the customer.com mail server to the tradesman.com mail server, which accepts it. Then tradesman.com tries to send it to email.com - but at this point, email.com checks who is permitted to send email "from" customer.com and finds that tradesman.com is *not permitted*, so it rejects the message.
There are fixes for this, specifically by modifying the email as it passes through the forwarding system, so that it no longer claims to be from the original domain, but they do not seem to be universally implemented. In some cases, the emails will be received but will have a bad "spam score" and end up in a junk folder.
I am writing this as a customer who has been unable to contact trades twice in the last year because of this. My guess is that these are one-person businesses who set up a website with email forwarding a few years ago, and it worked fine for a few years, and maybe now they aren't realising that they are missing some fraction of the emails that they should be getting.
The two solutions most certain solutions are:
1. Don't use your website domain for email, but advertise your gmail (etc.) email address.
2. Don't forward from the website domain, but read the email there (using e.g. IMAP).
I hope that is useful to someone!
For this example, say you have an email account on gmail.com, outlook.com, etc. I'll use [email protected] as an example. You also have a business website, say tradesman.com, hosted by one of the very many website hosting companies. You have set that up forward emails, e.g. [email protected], to your existing email address, [email protected].
Now say that you have a potential customer who tries to email you from their email address, [email protected].
What you hope will happen is that the email will go from the customer.com mail server to the tradesman.com mail server, and from there to the email.com mail server, where you'll be able to read it.
OK....
So that would have worked without a problem in the past. But there's a problem with scammers who impersonate other people or businesses. In the past, any email server could send a message claiming to be from [email protected], and it would be accepted by the receiving email server. To prevent that there are now protections in place. Specifically, in this case, whitehouse.gov advertises a list of servers that are permitted to send emails "from" whitehouse.gov. A receiving email server will check if the email it has been sent comes from a permitted sending server, and reject it if it doesn't.
This has the collateral effect of breaking some email forwarding.
In the example above, say the customer's email account at customer.com advertises that only customer.com is allowed to send emails "from" customer.com (which seems quite reasonable). Now, the email goes from the customer.com mail server to the tradesman.com mail server, which accepts it. Then tradesman.com tries to send it to email.com - but at this point, email.com checks who is permitted to send email "from" customer.com and finds that tradesman.com is *not permitted*, so it rejects the message.
There are fixes for this, specifically by modifying the email as it passes through the forwarding system, so that it no longer claims to be from the original domain, but they do not seem to be universally implemented. In some cases, the emails will be received but will have a bad "spam score" and end up in a junk folder.
I am writing this as a customer who has been unable to contact trades twice in the last year because of this. My guess is that these are one-person businesses who set up a website with email forwarding a few years ago, and it worked fine for a few years, and maybe now they aren't realising that they are missing some fraction of the emails that they should be getting.
The two solutions most certain solutions are:
1. Don't use your website domain for email, but advertise your gmail (etc.) email address.
2. Don't forward from the website domain, but read the email there (using e.g. IMAP).
I hope that is useful to someone!
