@epic.network I saw plenty of your posts about that topic, so linking you directly.
My situation: I was a the old G-Suite a couple of month back till Google announced to cancel this service. I created new Gmail accounts and migrated all my data. Next I forwarded my mails from my domain provider united-domains .de to Gmail. A couple of month later I switched to another domain registrar netcup .de and used Cloudflare as my DNS provider. I set up email routing of cloudflare to Gmail. That worked well for a time but lately I missed mails and checked the Cloudflare status and found Gmail rejecting mails. Yesterday I tried to switch to forwardemail .net but I have the same issue there but even worse. Mails are missing on Gmail side and also no logs are provided by forwardemail .net.
Current state is, that I switched back to Cloudflare Email Routing and forwarding the mails to gmx .de and setting up Gmail to pull these mails via pop3. That seems working.
I guess that is it and there is no better (free) way available at the moment. Is that correct?
I’m an unapologetic opponent of email forwarding. My official position on the practice for the past decade has been: DON’T.
Despite that being my official recommendation, there can be cases where it can work and, occasionally, even some where it makes sense.
If you cannot configure your GMX mailbox to accept direct delivery of your domain email, and it provides better delivery rates than forwarding to Gmail, it may be the right solution for you right now.
I reccomend using MX routing to a destination that is configured to accept mail for the domain. If your current setup is working satisfactorily, it may not be worth altering right now. If it becomes less reliable than you can tolerate, moving from forwarding to MX routing is always an option.
If you have valid DMARC, DKIM, and SPF, that covers most of what you can do at Cloudflare. If you have set up DMARC monitoring, that is something that you can do with Cloudflare.
Using best practices like only emailing people that asked to receive email, and not using service providers with poor reputations can help. Deeper exploration of this topic is probably drifting off-topic for discussion here.
I have DMARC monitoring and SPF set up on cloudflare dns. I am sending mails through gmail with my custom domain through google smtp server. Would DKIM setup on cloudflare help here to and do you have any advice how I can set this up?
Are you referring to Google Workspace or just the free Gmail? The latter can never send successfully authenticated domain email on your behalf. It requires that you use your own external server that is configured to DKIM sign email from your domain.
yes, using the free gmail one. I am thinking on getting mxroute and setup everything on my own. guess thats the only way getting stable mails with my own domain. compared to hosting my own mailserver what I don’t want to do.
@epic.network would you check my spf settings for my domain maucher-online.de and tell me if that is set up best possible for my Szenario? Mail forward to gmx, pop3 mails to gmail. Sending via gmail smtp but with my custom domain.
You cannot authorize Gmail to send as your domain. That requires Google Workspace.
Right now your SPF doesn’t include anywhere that you can send outbound mail from. You need to determine which SMTP server you can use to send valid domain email and then add their SPF into yours. You will also want to configure your DKIM according to that provider’s directions.
