Hello everyone,

Hope you are keeping well.

I have an issue with email forwarding that I am trying to figure out.

Exim-4.97 here, with Exim4U if that matters.

I have a setting where emails sent to ALIAS@domain are forwarded to USER1ACCOUNT@gmail.com and USER2ACCOUNT@gmail.com
For domains with strict SPF, this definitely fails as shown below.

<CUT>
This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of
its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following
address(es) failed:

  USER1ACCOUNT@gmail.com
    (ultimately generated from COMMON_ADDR@domain)
    host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com [142.250.27.26]
    SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:
    550-5.7.26 The MAIL FROM domain [alexanna.co.ke] has an SPF record with a hard
    550-5.7.26 fail policy (-all) but it fails to pass SPF checks with the ip:
    550-5.7.26 [41.212.32.14]. To best protect our users from spam and phishing,
    550-5.7.26 the message has been blocked. Please visit
    550-5.7.26 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#authentication for more
    550 5.7.26 information. mm11-20020a170906cc4b00b009c74e4ffa08si671339ejb.279 - gsmtp
  USER2@gmail.com
    (ultimately generated from COMMON_ADDR@domain)
    host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com [142.250.27.26]
    SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:
    550-5.7.26 The MAIL FROM domain [alexanna.co.ke] has an SPF record with a hard
    550-5.7.26 fail policy (-all) but it fails to pass SPF checks with the ip:
    550-5.7.26 [41.212.32.14]. To best protect our users from spam and phishing,
    550-5.7.26 the message has been blocked. Please visit
    550-5.7.26 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#authentication for more
    550 5.7.26 information. mm11-20020a170906cc4b00b009c74e4ffa08si671339ejb.279 - gsmtp
</CUT>

It looks like during the forwarding, I should rewrite the From: address to COMMON_ADDR@domain  instead of letting the original sender address stay in the Envelope sender?

This case is similar to https://lists.exim.org/lurker/thread/20231106.101434.4a28c7c1.en.html except that I do not use the redirect router. The forwarded email is handled by the remote_smtp transport

Has anyone else faced this issue with Gmail and other providers? How do you mitigate this?


--
Best regards,
Odhiambo WASHINGTON,
Nairobi,KE
+254 7 3200 0004/+254 7 2274 3223
"Oh, the cruft.", egrep -v '^$|^.*#' ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ :-)
[How to ask smart questions: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html]