How reliable has alias forwarding been (to external email addresses)

[akorvemaker]

I've been using Aliases to forward to non-Fastmail addresses for over 10 years. There have been minor issues.

I have a backup email account in case FM goes down that I only check semi-annually. A lot of legitimate email gets tagged as spam, and therefore deleted after 30 days before I see it. This might be better if I regularly logged in to gmail and marked them as non-spam.

Family members using our custom domain have their own address forwarded to their gmail account. It seems like a bit more ends up in spam than should. We've also had occasional issues with certain senders never getting mail through, but that problem was 4 years ago and we haven't been aware of it since.

Overall it seems to have worked quite well. I'm happy with it.

[yositimy]

I've also been using alias and forwarding for several years. Over the past couple of years I've noticed that certain client messages (e.g.from my daughter's gmail) or certain emails that provide password reset links (e.g. Amazon) get dropped within fastmail regardless of spam filter configuration.

These messages get reliably delivered to a main mailbox but not to an alias. Fastmail support says that can never happen, but it does.

May not apply to forwarding but dunno.

[audelair]

Originally Posted by yositimy

I've also been using alias and forwarding for several years. Over the past couple of years I've noticed that certain client messages (e.g.from my daughter's gmail) or certain emails that provide password reset links (e.g. Amazon) get dropped within fastmail regardless of spam filter configuration.

These messages get reliably delivered to a main mailbox but not to an alias. Fastmail support says that can never happen, but it does.

May not apply to forwarding but dunno.

Thanks for the feedback on that. Hah, i love it when support says "that can never happen" when it clearly does.

If I leave Google Workspace, I definitely would not be looking at Fastmail's support with rosy glasses. I'm one of the old Fastmail customers that got the rug pulled under on their very old lifetime membership that ended up not being lifetime (which is worse than what Google is doing since with Fastmail, we even paid for it whereas with Google, it just stopped being free).

[mark73]

Originally Posted by audelair

I am a Google Workspace legacy refugee considering either paying for Google Workspace or Fastmail. I used to be a Fastmail user a very long time ago (I still remember the good ol' days of doing css templates for the UI).

I love Fastmail's feature set. However, I will definitely be needing to do some alias forwarding. Both Google and Fastmail's forwarding passes DKIM but fails SPF but from the emails I tested, I had not experienced any deliverability issues.

That said, everyone that I will be forwarding email for will be using a Gmail destination address. So I figure using Google to forward to Google is less likely to have deliverability issues. But Fastmail, I am not sure confident.

I know some of the companies that specialize in forwarding (like ImprovMX, which I tried) manage to pass SPF (not sure exactly how they do it), but I don't see any split routing capabilities in Fastmail to allow me to farm unrecognized email recipients to another provider. I would assume POBox.com does it well, which is owned by Fastmail, but their product, whereas it uses the Fastmail webmail, does not have the entire feature set of Fastmail.

Any thoughts/experiences from people who have used alias forwarding extensively?

Thanks!

In order prevent SPF to be broken due to not authorised IP server SRS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Rewriting_Scheme) is an important features any forwarded emails should have implemented.

Debian has a nice package https://packages.debian.org/sid/mail/srs which can used for it.
Once installed you can use "socat" command to cypher/decypher the new rewrite sender like this

when bob@domain1.tld forwards through the host mx.domain2.tld the new sender is

socat - UNIX-CONNECT:/tmp/srsd

FORWARD bob@domain1.tld mx.domain2.tld
SRS0=ugrf=S3=domain1.tld=bob@mx.domain2.tld

now the sender is "SRS0=ugrf=S3=domain1.tld=bob@mx.domain2.tld"

for the recipient

socat - UNIX-CONNECT:/tmp/srsd
REVERSER SRS0=ugrf=S3=domain1.tld=bob@mx.domain2.tld
bob@domain1.tld

the original sender is "bob@domain1.tld"

[trikotret]

If you just want email forwarding service, you should look into Simplelogin.