I've seen a significant number of folks asking for help lately on various mailing lists and online forums (like Reddit), saying that they're now having trouble with email authentication, starting sometime in April, 2025.
In this post, the author talks about DMARC failing once their domain was transferred from Google Domains to Squarespace (Google previously spun off their domain registrar business to Squarespace). Why now and what exactly broke, I'm not exactly sure at the moment. It sounds like in some cases email messages are no longer signing with DKIM (meaning no more DKIM alignment, and thus DMARC failures are now causing deliverability issues). DKIM records might be getting lost in the move; or maybe DMARC records are being lost or changed in some way to force non-delivery in the case of a domain's sending not having full email authentication in place.
I also see another commonality across these complaints -- they all seem to be from folks trying to handle an email domain for business but without using actual business or domain-oriented email hosting for that domain. They're using some sort of automated email forwarind, maybe through their domain registrar, to land incoming email into a Gmail account, and often trying to use Gmail's "Send as SMTP" service to send out email as their business domain.
The fix? Don't do this; don't try to use a "hack workaround" method to send/receive email for your custom domain. Even if I knew exactly what to tell you to undo whatever just broke in these past few weeks, something else will likely break, or change, or get harder to do, in the near future. This just isn't a sustainable methodology for hosting email for your custom domain.
You need real email hosting for your domain. There are a ton of providers out there. Here are just a few.
Whatever service you use, you need to fully implement email authentication -- SPF and DKIM -- and publish an appropriately-configured DMARC record. See my MAGY sender compliance guide for more details.
One you "stop the hack," move to a "real" email provider that fully supports custom/business domains, and configure email authentication properly, you'll no longer have these issues. I promise! I've been using Google Workspace to host my domain email for years and I have never had the hosting or email system configuration cause issues with properly configuring email authentication and DMARC.
I've seen a significant number of folks asking for help lately on various mailing lists and online forums (like Reddit), saying that they're now having trouble with email authentication, starting sometime in April, 2025.
In this post, the author talks about DMARC failing once their domain was transferred from Google Domains to Squarespace (Google previously spun off their domain registrar business to Squarespace). Why now and what exactly broke, I'm not exactly sure at the moment. It sounds like in some cases email messages are no longer signing with DKIM (meaning no more DKIM alignment, and thus DMARC failures are now causing deliverability issues). DKIM records might be getting lost in the move; or maybe DMARC records are being lost or changed in some way to force non-delivery in the case of a domain's sending not having full email authentication in place.
I also see another commonality across these complaints -- they all seem to be from folks trying to handle an email domain for business but without using actual business or domain-oriented email hosting for that domain. They're using some sort of automated email forwarind, maybe through their domain registrar, to land incoming email into a Gmail account, and often trying to use Gmail's "Send as SMTP" service to send out email as their business domain.
The fix? Don't do this; don't try to use a "hack workaround" method to send/receive email for your custom domain. Even if I knew exactly what to tell you to undo whatever just broke in these past few weeks, something else will likely break, or change, or get harder to do, in the near future. This just isn't a sustainable methodology for hosting email for your custom domain.
You need real email hosting for your domain. There are a ton of providers out there. Here are just a few.
- Google Workspace (The one I use. Looks like this is what Squarespace recommends, too.)
- Microsoft 365 (Another one that I have a lot of familiarity with, and it works well.)
- Fastmail (A good alternative, if you don't want to use Google or Microsoft.)
- Zoho Mail (Free for up to 5 users.)
Whatever service you use, you need to fully implement email authentication -- SPF and DKIM -- and publish an appropriately-configured DMARC record. See my MAGY sender compliance guide for more details.One you "stop the hack," move to a "real" email provider that fully supports custom/business domains, and configure email authentication properly, you'll no longer have these issues. I promise! I've been using Google Workspace to host my domain email for years and I have never had the hosting or email system configuration cause issues with properly configuring email authentication and DMARC.
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