DMARC and forwarding

💻 Development
1

I have recently had problems delivering to Yahoo/comcast/AOL and resolved the issue by instituting a ‘reject’ DMARC policy however this makes it impossible to use the ‘forward to a friend’ facility as this breaks SPF/DKIM/DMARC and the forwarded email is then rejected by gmail/yahoo etc. So I have a problem, as organically growing the list through forwards is an important element of my strategy to increase my subscriber base but not having the emails delivered at all, as is happening if I don’t have a strict DMARC policy is clearly not a good idea. Mailchimp I notice (I have had some major problems delivering important time critical emails so have done a fair bit of testing) use a forward link that sends an (Dmarc compliant) email to the forwardee with a link to a webpage with the email, it is difficult to imagine how going forward (excuse the pun) the forward to a friend link can continue to be useful in it’s current implementation (understandable with 54 billion spam emails sent a day and stricter and stricter controls on authentication and origins) Is there some simple way of ensuring that forwards emails are SPF/DKIM/DMARC compliant?

2

Interesting. I’m not a DMARC expert but I don’t see how compliant forwarding can work. In any case people rarely forward using the forward links – do your stats agree with this? Perhaps you have designed your message content to draw attention to the forward buttons and thereby increased usage of the system.

Perhaps @michiel has a suggestion?

3

Yes, we should rethink the forward to a friend system. Probably the best way will be to not send it from the friend who forwards, but to send it from a system address (possibly aliased to that friend), so that it passes SPF/DKIM/DMARC checks.

2 Likes
4

Interesting.

@julianms Do you feel like reporting that as a feature request to the bug tracker?

5

But I’m now finding out that in 2024 if a user just forwards the message from within their own email client (not using phplist forward to a friend feature) it still breaks the chain of trust and those emails are being deleated and not arriving. . .