No forum emails received for the last 4 days (GMail)

Since December 14th I've received almost no forum reply notification emails. To be exact, I received one on Dec 16th, but no others.

In this time I should have received at least 20, probably more.

Also, today on Reddit someone has complained that they've not received the new user confirmation email, having waited 24 hours. It's not in their spam.

Both I and the Reddit poster are using GMail.

Based on this I think outbound forum emails are broken - either totally, or perhaps just for some email providers. EDIT: Seems it is specific to GMail, or GMail + other providers. A test email sent to a private .com domain arrived OK, but all emails to GMail addresses are failing.

There's definitely been something wrong with BMD's outbound forum emails for a while, because for several months all the forum reply notifications I've received have gone automatically to my GMail spam folder. I had to set up a specific filter to mark them as not spam, else 100% of them would go to spam.


I think this is due to blackmagicdesign.com emails not being encrypted:

OK, it looks like it is specific to certain destination email providers.

I just tried the "Email a friend" feature. I first sent two emails to two GMail addresses. Both failed to arrive - not even appearing in spam.

Then I sent a third email to a non-GMail address (a private .com domain), which arrived in seconds:


Based on this I think that all forum emails are failing to arrive at GMail addresses - perhaps due to blackmagicdesign.com emails not being sent encrypted?

It'd be great if your sysadmin could look at what's required to get forum@blackmagicdesign.com emails to arrive properly again at all providers.

I also own 2 email addresses that are not able to send emails to Gmail anymore.. It is a Gmail problem.!!

There SPAM policy is way to tight flagging a lot of non spam mails as spam and rejecting them at server side without putting them into spam folder anyway..

I also own 2 email addresses that are not able to send emails to Gmail anymore.. It is a Gmail problem.!!

There SPAM policy is way to tight flagging a lot of non spam mails as spam and rejecting them at server side without putting them into spam folder anyway..

Well, their requirement seems to be that the email is sent encrypted. That doesn't seem unreasonable to me. Though I do agree that blocking them completely rather than spamming them may be going a bit far - especially without any announcement of that as a new policy (that I can find anyway.)

But regardless of whose fault it is, GMail makes up ~20% of the email market. Not being able to send emails to GMail is, in my opinion, a huge problem. Reply notifications aren't the most important thing in the world, but if new users trying to sign up never receive a confirmation email, it means they can't create a new account.

So up to one in 5 people trying to sign up to the forum will now be unable to do so, with no explanation as to why. I'd definitely say that's a problem, and it's fixable on BMD's side. I'm not noticing any other expected emails failing to arrive - including from all the other forums I receive emails from.

Thanks for fixing this

[BMD Web Engineering]

No Worries,

we do actually pay attention- although we may not respond to all messages.

For those interested in Gmail's inner workings (warning technical content ahead):

It was not the TLS encryption that was the issue (I added that "for free"), rather, Google tightening their DMARC policies; to reject mail failing SPF/DKIM tests. In the past, these messages have been sent to your Gmail SPAM folder, but are now rejected outright.
DMARC is an attempt to reduce the amount of SPAM email, by specifying which servers may send mail on behalf of an organization.

This occurred 'silently' around December 14th 2021.

You can check the status of DMARC (which uses SPF and DKIM) by using the "Show original" option on a message.

This will display additional information about the message- you are interested in fields at the bottom of the headers- they should all "PASS".

Great! Thanks for the fix and the additional info.