Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2020 July 24

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July 24

Gmail issues

I've noticed two strange things in some of my Gmail letters:

• in one instance the recipient field shows the sender's email instead of mine (as if the sender has sent the email to herself), yet the mail correctly arrived to me;
• in another mail from a book publisher there's a question mark at the sender's profile, saying that Gmail was unable to verify that the email was sent from that domain and that it could be a spam. Yet, when I rechecked the sender's email at the book publisher's official website, both were identical, meaning that the sender is rather genuine.

Why is that? Brandmeister^talk 15:30, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

In the former case, you may have been listed on the email's blind carbon copy bcc: list. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 16:08, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

The latter may be due to the sender's domain having a missing, or misconfigured, Sender Policy Framework setting. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 16:12, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

Regarding the latter, the address in the sender field is not authoritative! You can send e-mail with any sender address for much the same reasons as you can write any return address on a physical letter. You need another method such as SPF mentioned above to verify that the sender is who he says he is. 93.136.103.194 (talk) 16:57, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

To elucidate, most likely Gmail expects mail from that domain to come with a valid DKIM/SPF header and it didn't, or the header is invalid. If Gmail's webmail provides a way to view the source of the mail you could see for yourself which is the case. However Gmail is very aggressive when it comes to chucking into spam e-mails not coming from major freemail companies. In that case, the e-mail could of course be completely valid (if the sender doesn't use SPF/DKIM at all -- considering that e-mail spoofing doesn't exactly happen to you every day). 93.142.123.92 (talk) 18:18, 26 July 2020 (UTC)