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

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).