Google have announced that later this year Gmail will no longer allow you to bring email into Gmail by checking a POP3 mailbox.
This is how all my email users get the email from their domain on my sympl server.
Does anyone have experience of simply forwarding emails to a Gmail address? Does this cause your server’s spam rating to nose dive? Does sympl’s mail server support SRS or ARC?
Does anyone have any other suggestions? Is there some kind of script i could run on my server to move email from a mailbox into Gmail via their API, IMAP or anything like that?
Simply forwarding to Gmail will break SPF. Gmail and many other mail services will reject the mail.
I expect your spam rating would suffer too, if you persisted.
Where I’ve needed to forward emails, especially to mailing lists, I’ve resorted to writing a script to process them, which is hooked in by the pipe command in a forward file in the recipient mailbox directory.
The script creates a whole new message, retaining Content-type, Content-disposition, Content-transfer-encoding, Content-length, Lines, Mime-version and message body from the original, reading and possibly altering Subject, From and To. All other headers are discarded.
The redirected message will have envelope from header set to something based on a locally hosted domain to satisfy SPF requirements, and typically I invent a new From header and set Reply-to the same as the incoming message From.
I’ve been surprised at how well it works. It passes the tests at https://www.mail-tester.com with flying colours, and all combinations of plain text, html and attachments go though fine. I usually set envelope From to a webmaster address that aliases to me, so I receive any bounce messages, and Gmail happily accepts mail forwarded that way.
I looked at SRS but couldn’t understand how to implement it.
My script is in PHP, not because it’s a good tool for the job, but because it’s the only suitable language I’m really familiar with in recent years, especially as some of my mail scripts use a database. Mail is sent out using the standard PHP mail() function. No special API needed.
I question the question.
If people are using Gmail, why are they doing that?
It used to have good spam filtering, but there are better spam filtering options now.
People might be reluctant to move away because it loses their gmail address, but that’s just deferring the problem, which inevitably gets worse over time.
If gmail users are to break free, they should get a proper email address that is their own, not one that belongs to a foreign oligarch.
Then they should exclusively use that address for outgoing email, mopping up incoming mail misdirected to their old gmail address and hopefully it will fade away.
This is some short term hassle, but the sooner you do it, the better.
I don’t know about the original poster, but I have several mailing lists on my server and there’s no way the subscribers are all going to be persuaded to get another email address for it
Sorry, I don’t understand. How is that affected? Your mailing lists are presumably sending ‘from’ the mailing list address.
Having said that, what are you using for the mailing list?
I used to run Mailman2 but foolishly tried to switch to Mailman3 and ended up giving up!
I used it for a while. It nicely fetched to Gmail and Gmailify sorted things automatically into folders, removed the spam etc. Receiving and sending used the correct personal email address so all was good. People were not using gmail, just the gmail tool as a mail client.
Now I am just back to using normal email apps and configuring spam lists on the server. It is fine either way for me but I can see why many are not happy.
Basically doing a straight forward will cause Gmail to mark a lot of mail as spam at best, and at worse they’ll reject it (causing backscatter) or accept it and just drop it into a blackhole.
Yes, if you’re forwarding any spam or SPF’d mail then it’ll reflect badly on the IP.
Unfortunately not - SRS is really complex to implement (you need to do a lot of rewriting and send bounces back to the original sender), and often breaks DKIM and so on, as well as tanking the rating for the sending domain for all Gmail users.
ARC is a newer thing but it’s not much less-complex, and its support is fairly limited.
You’ve got half of SRS there, the missing bit would be to deal properly with bounces, which are going to cause you fairly serious issues.
Forwarding mail and mailing lists are always going to be a problem now all the anti-spam measures effectively prevent it, and there’s not really any way around it barring maybe something more crazy like syncing mailboxes via IMAP so the messages are directly placed in the destination mailbox.
(I wrote a blog post about this subject a little over a year ago.)
The good news there is that the Gmail mobile client supports IMAP.
There are a few things which can be done to improve webmail on Sympl, mainly quality of life things, but they don’t provide the nice UI and spam filtering which Gmail does, just make it a little easier to access the mailbox.
I use my own code for the mailing list, and yes, the “From” address is based on the domain where the mails are forwarded from (i.e. my server).
The same class can be used in other places for forwarding individual email addresses. It’s like a mailing list with one recipient, but without the complexity of something like mailman.
Yes, bounces go to me, which is fine for my purposes, but would not scale well.
I suppose bounces for individual redirects would have to be handled by a similar forwarding script (or extra code in the existing one) and it all starts getting messy.
I got around this myself by taking the nuclear option and just ditched Gmail altogether. Instead, I signed up for Fastmail and used my own domain. It costs money, but its spam and filtering tools are good.
