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Can I use the VPS mail service for forwarding mails?

It is not possible to forward e-mails using our VPS mail service.

The reason for this lies in the way how forwarding works (this applies to all e-mail systems worldwide). The original mailserver will send a mail using the SPF record of the sender domain, which will probably have authorized that server's IP address. The problem is that when a mail is forwarded (by our servers), the original email address but also the IP of our VPS mail service servers will be seen by the receiving mail server as having sent the original message.

If for example someone mails from a gmail-address, our mail servers IP-addresses will not be listed in the SPF-record for gmail.com so our server is not authorized. In most cases this will result in either a bounce or a marking as 'unwanted'.

Why do you not have support for this?

There is a technology called SRS (Sender Rewrite Scheme) that creates a workaround where not the original domain, but the forwarding domain is added to the mail envelopen.

SRS is in theory a great technique, but the implementation is still lacking or pretty difficult to configure (it requires compiling your mail server from source). Because of this we have decided during the test-phase that we will not official support this, as we can not guarantee it working successfully in most cases. We do however monitor its developments and may support it at a later stage.


 

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net2air August 22, 2022 (#8660)

SRS has come and gone since this (undated) article was written! (Supported in e.g. Postfix and Ubuntu but largely replaced by DKIM).