Your Email Forwarding Used To Work Fine
But Now It's Broken
That's Because the New Rules of Email Delivery
took effect earlier this year
In early 2024, the Big Tech giants like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft made the decision to enforce certain email protocols which were designed years ago to reduce spam and fake emails.
We could go into the gory technical details - and we did, in several blog posts and newsletter messages to easyDNS clients.
The New Rules of Email Delivery
They have names like "SPF" and "DKIM" and "DMARC", but the one that is likely breaking your email forwarding is the first one, SPF, or Sender Policy Framework.
Applying these protocols to your own email domain used to be largely optional.
But in early 2024 Google, Yahoo and Microsoft made it mandatory that in order to be able to deliver email into their systems you had to have these protocols enabled on your email sender domains.
We call them "The New Rules of Email Delivery".
As of that date - the New Rules of Email Delivery meant that not only did you have to have these protocols enabled for your email sender domains, those rules would also be applied against all inbound email.
Overall, this was not a "bad thing" or some overreach by the megacorps, these are necessary and useful protocols that make your email more usable and with less spam and scams. The industry at large, led by these tech giants, decided (after years, we might add), that it's time to implement these best practices more widely.
The "email re-routing hack" that fixes email forwarding broken by SPF...
When SPF was created, it was already known at the time that on a technical level, SPF breaks email forwarding.
So a sister-specification was created, called Sender Rewrite Scheme (SRS)
Sender Rewrite provides a way to safely forward emails without breaking SPF.
We won't go into the gory details of that either, but we do outline how SRS works here.
The weird thing was - very few ISPs and email providers ever adopted SRS.
Maybe because SPF was largely optional and enforcement was lax.
SRS was also non-trivial to implement, and you have to get it right. It also incurs a certain amount of overhead for the mail servers handing the forwarded email.
But given how email forwarding at your own domain was such core use case here for decades, it was something we knew would be needed eventually, and we've had it in place here for a long time.
Sender Rewrite is now a "must-have", not a "nice-to-have", when you're forwarding email at your own domain.
Now that the New Rules of Email Delivery have kicked in across the internet, it means that your email forwarding domains have to be using Sender Rewrite or more and more of your forwarded messages are going to be undelivered.
This includes:
- Critical business communications
- Messages from or to your loved ones
- Even internal notes back and forth amongst your own team
SRS eliminates MEA: "Missing Email Anxiety"
If you've developed the unwanted mental habit of stressing over expected emails that haven't shown up - it's probably gotten worse this year.
And now you know the reason why.
Here's how you fix it:
All easyDNS email forwards use Sender Rewrite
All you really need to do is transfer your domain name over to easyDNS and your email forwards at that domain will automatically start using SRS as soon as they begin traversing our servers.
What about hosted emails? And those other protocols like DKIM and DMARC?
If your email domain uses a mixture of hosted email boxes and email forwarding, we've got you covered.
Your email forwards will automatically be delivered using SRS - there's no complicated setup for that. It just happens.
Your hosted mailboxes via easyMail will be automatically setup with DKIM and DMARC when you activate easyMail - so you typically won't need to worry about those either.
We even have an email migration tool that can move all your hosted email over here for you.
Whether you're going to register a new domain, or transfer your existing one, all service levels include Sender Rewrite on email forwarding, while the table below lays out the hosted easyMail boxes included with each domain service level.
Domain Plus |
Standard |
Pro |
Enterprise |
|||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
FREE (entry level DNS) WITH DOMAIN REGISTRATION |
From $35/Year
WITH DOMAIN REGISTRATION $20/ Year Without Registration |
From $55/Year
WITH DOMAIN REGISTRATION $40/ Year Without Registration |
From $155/Year
WITH DOMAIN REGISTRATION |
|||
Register or Transfer Domain |
Get DNS Standard | Get DNS Pro | Get Enterprise | |||
DNS FEATURES |
DNS FEATURES |
DNS FEATURES |
DNS FEATURES |
|||
20 | Unlimited Resource Records | |||||
250,000 | 1 Million | 5 Million DNS Inquiries/ Month | 5 Million | |||
3 | 15 Total Nameservers/ POP | 26 | ||||
3 Anycast DNS Clouds | 4 | |||||
Host Monitoring + Failover - 1 Record included |
3 | |||||
Dynamic DNS Support | ||||||
IPv6 Support | ||||||
Set and Forget DNSSEC Support |
||||||
EASYMAIL AND |
EASYMAIL AND |
EASYMAIL AND |
EASYMAIL AND |
|||
3 | 10 easyMail IMAP 5 GB Box | 25 | ||||
10 | 100 | 100 Email Forwarding | 100 | |||
Backup Mail Spooling/ Backup MX Support |
||||||
SMTP Port Forwarding | ||||||
Outbound SMTP/ Mail Relay | ||||||
ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT AND SECURITY |
ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT AND SECURITY |
ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT AND SECURITY |
ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT AND SECURITY |
|||
IP-Based ACL | ||||||
Geo-Based Restrictions | ||||||
Auth Tokens for Dynamic DNS | ||||||
Domain Portfolio-Sharing | ||||||
URL Forwarding | ||||||
Stealth Forwarding/ URL Cloaking |
||||||
Geo-target URL Forwards | ||||||
Register or Transfer Domain |
Get DNS Standard | Get DNS Pro | Get Enterprise | |||
We take the pain out of switching registrars
Since most of you reading this page already use us for DNS, we're guessing that the main reason you still haven't consolidated after all these years is because your current registrar makes it hard to move your domains away.
We make it easy. Because we do all the work for you.
Once you give us the go-ahead, we can do all of the heavy lifting for you so that you reap all the benefits and get to skip all the hassle.
For Individual Domains:
Log into the member control panel, open the domain you want to manage, and click on Switch Registrar.
After you generate and remit the invoice, open an EASY-DOES.IT ticket to hand it off to us:
For Domain Portfolios
Managing a large portfolio of domains? Either on behalf of your own organization or across numerous clients of your own?
We have a comprehensive management platform that can even be whitelabeled.
Request a call back today and a Client Solutions Architect will be in touch to plan your migration.