PSA for people with their own email domain: Google is rejecting mail without DKIM

[squirrelitude]

Somewhere in the past days or weeks, Google started either bouncing email without a DKIM signature or is silently filing it as spam. (DKIM: DomainKeys Identified Mail, an anti-spoofing measure.)

If you receive email at a domain you registered, there is a good chance that recipients who use Google Mail are not receiving it. You'll need to ensure that you're getting a DKIM "pass" result that matches your domain name.

For example, I use Fastmail. GMail was indicating "DKIM PASS from messagingengine.com" (that's Fastmail's actual mail service) but was still rejecting my mail. Once I added the DNS records that Fastmail indicating I needed to add in their settings page for my domain, I instead started getting "DKIM PASS from [my actual domain]" and my mail started getting through.

(While DKIM is a reasonable tool and it's fine that Google is using this as part of their spam check, I suspect they're doing this strict version to try to solidify their position by further freezing out other mail providers.)

Comments

[wpadmirer]

My email domain is hosted with a local ISP, and so far I haven't had any trouble getting my emails through. I appreciate the warning! I'll definitely keep an eye out for that.

Damn gmail!

[yarrowkat]

would you be willing to walk me through the implications of this for someone using DreamHost? it hosts our website (using wordpress) & its associated email domain. i am not a tech person - have been described as a "competent end-user" by the tech people in my life. so i usually don't know *how* the thing actually works, but can often *make* it work with some guidance. :)

[thewayne]

Hmmmm. I have several private domains, I don't normally send email from them, but I receive lots. I should test them at some point.

Thanks for the info!