Various smart people have various, differing opinions on why. My opinion is that we can thank spammers for screwing things up. Ever since the first necessary attempts to block open relay spam, and followed shortly thereafter by bigger steps toward mailbox provider spam filtering based on IP reputation, we should have realized that email transmission methodologies that bounced messages through additional mail servers were eventually going to be doomed.
Email authentication adds to that complexity as well; DMARC came along and started to impact email forwarding in 2014-2015 (as I blogged about back then) and we know that Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is just not forwarding friendly, as it's all about the IP of the last hop. DKIM is supposed to be, but complexity of implementation on the receiving side leaves some notable gaps where it'll fail when you expect (or at least wish) that it wouldn't. Future versions of DKIM are likely to improve things, I think, but, well, that's the future, and this is today.
So how do we deal with email forwarding, today, in 2025? What are the challenges, and what are the options, and why might you even want to get out of the email forwarding business.
Here find my thoughts on all of this, from my most recent Valimail "Ask Al" video (number 54 in the series, by the way!). Watch the video embedded above, or find it here on Youtube. And I welcome your feedback! Drop me a line with your thoughts.
Email forwarding is a huge pain in the rear end.
Various smart people have various, differing opinions on why. My opinion is that we can thank spammers for screwing things up. Ever since the first necessary attempts to block open relay spam, and followed shortly thereafter by bigger steps toward mailbox provider spam filtering based on IP reputation, we should have realized that email transmission methodologies that bounced messages through additional mail servers were eventually going to be doomed.
Email authentication adds to that complexity as well; DMARC came along and started to impact email forwarding in 2014-2015 (as I blogged about back then) and we know that Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is just not forwarding friendly, as it's all about the IP of the last hop. DKIM is supposed to be, but complexity of implementation on the receiving side leaves some notable gaps where it'll fail when you expect (or at least wish) that it wouldn't. Future versions of DKIM are likely to improve things, I think, but, well, that's the future, and this is today.
So how do we deal with email forwarding, today, in 2025? What are the challenges, and what are the options, and why might you even want to get out of the email forwarding business.
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