Email Changes at IONOS

[Infrasonic]

I use the free domain email monitoring from this lot...https://www.mailhardener.com/features

Online dashboard...https://www.mailhardener.com/dashboard/

Tutorials...https://www.mailhardener.com/kb/

If you send a lot of domain email to Gmail or outlook.com addresses or their hosted domains you might want to use their services to see if there are any specific issues they have with your domain. Microsoft in particular have a habit of silently dropping domain email (no NDR) on a whim, so it's best to see what criteria they currently implement.

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/ ... 19120&rd=1

https://sendersupport.olc.protection.ou ... icies.aspx

[Tubaman]

After three emails back and forth now with IONOS's complaints department, they have finally confirmed that their initial guidance was incorrect. As long as the domain part of your mailbox matches that of the sender address set, then you will still be able to send emails OK, the part before the '@' doesn't need to match exactly as stated in their guidance notes.

So if you've got just a single domain with them you send emails from you should be fine. If you have multiple domains then you'll need to set up a mailbox for each domain as it will no longer be possible to send from 'me@mydomain1.com' via a mailbox 'me@mydomain2.com'.

I told them it would be a really good idea to send out updated guidance to affected users given the confusion it's caused, but they seem pretty reluctant to do so ("not up to me" response), so their loss if customers leave because of their incorrectly worded guidance.

Anyway, saves the effort of us moving providers (assuming the complaints department as given me accurate info of course!)

[mc2fool]

After three emails back and forth now with IONOS's complaints department, they have finally confirmed that their initial guidance was incorrect. As long as the domain part of your mailbox matches that of the sender address set, then you will still be able to send emails OK, the part before the '@' doesn't need to match exactly as stated in their guidance notes.

Ah, but does it need to match a valid recipient address at that domain? Either by there being a mailbox for the address, or a forwarder, or a catch all?

[Tubaman]

Ah, but does it need to match a valid recipient address at that domain? Either by there being a mailbox for the address, or a forwarder, or a catch all?

Nope, they said as long as the domain matches it will work. Their reluctance to send out clarification to everyone with examples of course leaves an element of doubt.

[Stompa]

Ah, but does it need to match a valid recipient address at that domain? Either by there being a mailbox for the address, or a forwarder, or a catch all?

Nope, they said as long as the domain matches it will work. Their reluctance to send out clarification to everyone with examples of course leaves an element of doubt.

Indeed. Even if they don't send out clarification, they surely should be expected to update the info shown in the link given in their original email.

[Infrasonic]

...Anyway, saves the effort of us moving providers (assuming the complaints department as given me accurate info of course!)

Moving providers might not make much difference if these IONOS changes are being driven by the big players, Gmail, Microsoft, Yahoo et al.

If they change their thresholds for delivery to their systems via minimum authentication requirements then you have a binary choice, comply and get delivered (probably) or ignore and start getting NDR's (or silently dropped if they think you are a potential spammer or your hosts SMTP IPv4 IP addresses are pumping out a lot of spam).

The major webmail providers currently have a relatively relaxed attitude, much non fully compliant email will get dumped in the receive ends spam folder for the recipient to allow list/add to contacts if genuine.

DMARC has been around for some time and now they are starting to tighten their inbound mail policy thresholds. It may eventually end up that you will need sent from/reply addresses matching exactly, SPF and DKIM and a decent DMARC policy (=quarantine or reject rather than none) + valid PTR records et al in order to get successfully delivered domain email.

If you use one of the various online email delivery scoring systems then you'll need all that (and more..) in place already to get the highest possible delivery compliance marks...

[Stompa]

It looks like IONOS have finally got round to amending the information given in the link they provided in their original email:

https://www.ionos.co.uk/help/index.php?id=5380

[denmon]

it seems sure that
outgoing sender [fred@genou.co.uk] , smtp login [fred@genou.co.uk] is going to work, but it's the trivial case

whereas
outgoing sender [fred@genou.co.uk] , smtp login [router@genou.co.uk] is in question, and it is the one that you'd want to work.

It's mindboggling that IONOS hadn't grasped what they needed to clarify. I assume they will be clarifying ASAP. I'll sit on my hands for a while.

I found a pretty official page about it from Ionos. The forum won't let me post a link, but if you google "ionos no-sending-of-emails-with-a-different-sender-address" it should be the first hit.

I think those of us who use a wildcard mailbox to receive all email to anything@domain.com, and then send from an assortment of different addresses at that same domain (like using 'Customize From Address...' in Thunderbird) should be OK. Quoting from the Ionos page:

Example
Your IONOS contract contains the domain example.com. You installed a script on the associated webspace that sends the content of a contact form to you as an email. You use an email address from Gmail with the ending @gmail.com as the sender address.

As of January 15, 2024, you can only use sender addresses in your script that end in @example.com. Emails with other senders will not be delivered.

and

For email addresses, enter a sender address that uses a contract domain. It is important that the part after the @ sign in the email address belongs to a domain from your contract. If you have other domains under the same contract number, you can also use these email addresses.

Nowhere in that document do they say the address you send from have to exist as distinct configured emails at Ionos, only that the domain has to be one that is associated with your account. They still don't explicitly say unconfigured From addresses in the same domain are OK, but they don't say anything to indicate it wouldn't.

[Infrasonic]

If you want to send domain email from different domain addresses the best way to do it successfully (i.e. get delivered) is with subdomains.

Explainer here..https://www.mailgun.com/blog/email/the- ... ubdomains/

[Infrasonic]

https://internet.nl/test-mail/