(Last updated on: May 21, 2018)
This happened to some Wintix users who informed Center Stage Software about it. We got in touch with Mandrill, which is the email server we use for Wintix and Webtix emails. Mandrill reported back that the emails were received, sent, and reported as “delivered.” However, the emails never made it to their final destination. The problem is because of DMARC validation.
A Short History: Trust for Sale
Email became popular in the 1990s. Everyone loved email as we realized there were many benefits to be had. One of the biggest benefits was that everyone knew that if they got an email, they should read it. Spammers (and other scum) also discovered that their unsolicited emails would be read.
Email became a mess. There was so much garbage that it was difficult to find the email you wanted to read. The problem became defined as a matter of trust. To put it another way, who do you trust and how do you identify them?
Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) is an email-validation system designed to detect and prevent email spoofing. It is intended to combat certain techniques often used in phishing and email spam, such as emails with forged sender addresses that appear to originate from legitimate organizations.
Oh – and also with DKIM and SPF. All you really need to know about this alphabet soup is that your Internet Guru at work needs to make sure your email address is verified and these protocols know it’s really you at your email address.
Here is what Mandrill says:
Generally speaking, once Mandrill hands off a message to the recipient’s email server and receives a successful SMTP response, we lose any visibility into how that email may be handled. A successful response indicates that the recipient email server has accepted responsibility for the message. It’s possible emails are routed into a spam folder, or even rejected due to an internal policy, but this information isn’t provided to Mandrill.
If you’re sure that they’re not receiving these emails (and that they aren’t in the spam folder), you may wish to ask them to contact their email administrator. Since each of these SMTP responses contains a unique code assigned by the recipient server, it should be relatively simple for them to track down how this message may have been handled after it was received from Mandrill.
Here is an SMTP response that might be helpful:
550 5.7.1 Unauthenticated email from XXXXX.org is not accepted due to domain’s DMARC policy. Please contact the administrator of XXXXX.org domain if this was a legitimate mail. Please visit https://support.google.com/mail/answer/2451690 to learn about the DMARC initiative. b141-v6si2290029yba.131 – gsmtp
Setting up SPF and DKIM for XXXXX.org may satisfy this policy, otherwise, you may wish to have the DMARC policy set as more relaxed.