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Gravity forms – Notification Issues

Having email Notification issues with Gravity Forms?

It can be hard to find a root cause since many issues can be behind notifications not being sent or received, and perhaps you are experiencing an issue that is less common and will require the support of your server administrator to solve.

One possible solution: there is a issue related with notifications being received when using an email in the domain of Yahoo or AOL in the from address. This isn’t due to an issue with Gravity Forms or your server, it is due to how these providers have configured their domains DMARC records.

  new-yahoo-logo

The problem here is related to a new DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) “reject” policy advertised by Yahoo to third-party email servers.

With the new policy, when a Yahoo user sends an email to a mailing list, the list’s server distributes that message to all subscribers, changing the headers and breaking DMARC validation. List subscribers with email accounts on servers that perform DMARC checks, such as Gmail, Hotmail (Outlook.com), Comcast or Yahoo itself, will reject the original message and respond back to the list with automated DMARC error messages.

So users of Gmail, Hotmail and other DMARC-enabled providers will not only fail to receive messages sent to the mailing list by Yahoo users, but will flood the list with bounce messages, risking to be bounced off the list themselves.

Laura Tessmer Atkins is a client of mine and  co-founder of email anti-spam consultancy firm Word to the Wise based in Palo Alto, California, also confirmed and documented the issue in a blog post. She believes that Yahoo began advertising a “reject” policy because of a recent attack against Yahoo users that involved attackers compromising yahoo.com email accounts and sending unauthorized emails to their contacts.

aol_logo1

AOL imposed a stricter email-validation process aimed at stamping down a “spoofing” attack that plagued users a couple years ago. The policy change makes it easy for mailbox providers to determine which emails are fakes, but the situation is not always so obvious for email users.

Following a similar move by Yahoo, AOL changed its DMARC policy to “reject,” meaning that a line of text has been added to its DNS record instructing mailbox providers to reject any email allegedly associated with an AOL domain that didn’t originate from an AOL server. Although the header of a spoofed email has been specially crafted to make it appear the message originated from a specific AOL email address, it in fact never crosses AOL’s servers.

The change to the email authentication system came after days of users complaining of emails that appear to originate from AOL users that contain links to sites with often nefarious intentions such as spreading malware or peddling diet pills.

  • For more information on the Yahoo domain issue click here.
  • For more info on the AOL domain issue click here.
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