Emails to gmail randomly disappearing

[#1]

I seemed to fought myself into a corner from which I appear to be a supporter of Gmail's approach. This is not what I intended. I am simply banging the drum for the mandating of any process that will keep the bad guys at bay as far as is practicable.

If one reads the SPF rules, unless there IS a SPF record which mandates a HARD FAIL if the SPF record is not matched, a SPF failure SHOULD be delivered with a warming that the mail might be spam.

How often are these rules applied? The implication is that they aren't. If applied correctly would many legitimate emails be marked as possible or probable spam? If so, presumably such messages would end up in a rarely checked spam folder and/or deleted by the recipient without being read?

[#2]

How often are these rules applied?

From what I can see, from my two email providers, lack of or SOFT FAIl SPF is used to increase Spam scoring rather than to explicitly mark as spam.

[#3]

The decision to enforce SPF rules is a decision made by the receiving email service.  That requires...

1. Looking to see if there is a SPF for the sender's email domain
2. If a SPF record is found...
   1. Check to see if the sending SMPT server is in the permitted list - if it is, it is a PASS
   2. Check to see what the FAIL rule is specified by the sending domain
      1. HARD FAIL - do not accept the email
      2. SOFT FAIL - accept the email and optionally mark it as potential SPAM
3. If no SPF record is found - result is NONE which is not the same as FAIL

See section 8 here -  RFC 7208: Sender Policy Framework (SPF) for Authorizing Use of Domains in Email, Version 1 (rfc-edit...

Further G2 in the context of processing (reasonably SOFT) "FAIL" states

result in the email being marked negatively in some way (this might be via delivery to a special spam folder, modifying subject lines, or other locally determined means)

Ditching NONE outcomes can readily be read as not compliant with the spirit of the RFC.

[#4]

@Baldrick1

We have a perfect storm here brought about in part by a big bully boy. Gmail can offer free email services on the back of all the money they make from mining email content. I cannot believe that the content of email on their services is in examined and is not exploited commercially.

This is a consequence of users wanting, expecting email for free. In other spaces, how do users expect organisations which attract no revenues to maintain email services to the state of the art levels you imply? It is not a reasonable expectation. Unfortunately your suggestions come true, they get retired.

The industry has seen many ISPs ditch email entirely - the JLP brand goes soon, orange went a long m time ago, as did Tesco and have countless others.

Personally if emails sent to Gmail bounce I ask them to provide and address with an alternative competent email provider. Sometimes the alternative address is a Plusnet one … and all is OK. And no those emails are not originating from my Plusnet account but from a state of the art email service with every bell and whistle going … and Gmail still whinges.

[#5]

I have read through this post several times but I simply cannot understand what I have to do to once again get my emails received by Gmail accounts. I have only just discovered that I am suffering the same problem as the OP, but I don't know how to add the SPF record, if that is what is needed to fix this.

Can you please explain this in simple terms?

So far, in Outlook, I have changed my outgoing smtp server to 587, & encrypted connection to TLS. Then in my third party domain (Freeola), I have found a setting to add a DNS record, but I do not know which option to select, or where to type your line 

v=spf1 a mx include:_spf-internal.plus.net include:_spf-internal2.plus.net ~all

, any help would be gratefully received.

[#6]

@kmw350  see here https://freeola.com/support/domain-dns-setting.html

Create a TXT record with the LHS as default (@) and the RHS as the text above

[#7]

Thank you very much, will do

[#8]

That worked immediately, thank you @MisterW 

[#9]

SMTP Port 587 should use STARTTLS encryption - not TLS.

If your domain is hosted elsewhere, why are you not using your email hosting provider's SMTP services?