GMail delivery problems: is subdomain discourse.ourdomain.org strictly necessary in outgoing mails?

Support
1

I started running a Discourse instance in December 2024, and we’re one of those quite some that have trouble with GMail.
Users trying to create an account with a GMail address will never receive an email from our instance. No, also not in spam folder. I extensively read meta.discourse and understand that the probable reason is that we don’t have a valid DKIM signature for discourse.ourdomain.org, only for ourdomain.org.

I tried with Discourse Another SMTP - #10 by Monikas, but didn’t get it working and never got a reply on how to exactly configure it.

On searching again, I started configuring Configure Google login for Discourse, but then realized that these users will still never receive emails from us, it would only help them authenticate.

As I don’t feel competent to configure DKIM and stuff for our discourse subdomain, I wonder if it would be an issue to send mails from discourse@ourdomain.org instead of noreply@discourse.ourdomain.org. Or is there any strong argument for including this subdomain in outgoing e-mails?

Thanks in advance!

3

How did you set up outbound email for your site? Seems to me you need to consider switching to a new, better provider.

Email is hard, as we all know, so you have my full sympathy! :hugs:

I recommend you work your way through the email troubleshooting steps. Please report back here and let us know how you get on!

4

I had similar issues years ago. Unfortunately not all providers understand the requirements for secure e-mail delivery:

  1. proper setup of Sender Policy Framework (SPF) in your domains DNS settings
  2. proper DKIM signing of each mail (e.g. with OpenDKIM)
  3. setup of DMARC as a backup if SPF and DKIM fail

These functions are mandatory and must be implementend either on your local mail-server or on the relaying mail server of your provider. Otherwise your outgoing mail will be blocked. For example by gmail.com - but also by most others.

In my case I use an external service (duocircle.com) as a relay, for both incoming mail (including spam protection) and outgoing mail (smtp).

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5

Thanks for your replies! As I didn’t receive feedback on whether the subdomain would be necessary, I switched to discourse@ourdomain.org as sender address. This works perfectly.

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