Many users set a automatic forwarding in of e-mail, e.g. from a business address to a personal account such as Hotmail, Outlook or Gmail. At first glance, this seems convenient, but in practice it often causes problems with message delivery.
Why forwarded emails often do not arrive
Major e-mail providers such as Microsoft (Hotmail, Outlook, Live) and Google (Gmail) assess incoming e-mails more and more strictly to counter spam and phishing. In doing so, they check whether the sender can be technically verified via so-called SPF, DKIM and DMARC records.
When a message on server level is forwarded, it seems for these checks as if our mail server is the original sender. Because the forwarded mail no longer comes directly from the original server, authentication fails. As a result, Microsoft and Google often regard such messages as suspicious or unauthenticated, resulting in:
- in the spam folder end up,
- be rejected or refused, or
- totally not be delivered.
This is not an outage or fault of our servers, but a result of the strict policies of these external mail services.
Our advice
We recommend no automatic forwarding set.
Instead, use the own mailbox that belongs to your domain. You can easily access it via webmail or set it up in an e-mail programme (such as Outlook, Apple Mail or Gmail via IMAP).
An added benefit is that when you next reply to an e-mail, this one too from your own organisational address and not from a Hotmail or Gmail address. This looks more professional and avoids confusion for the recipient.
