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

[squirrelitude]

Info from DreamHost on how to see if DKIM is set up: https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en-us/articles/215029758-What-are-DKIM-records-

...but the gold standard is still to send an email and check if the receiving server sees valid DKIM. :-)

(I'd also be happy to help out and take a look more directly if none of the above helps.)