Email forwarding, eBay mail and gmail

[4zwune0d]

I was positive I posted about this around a week ago but the message
isn't here. I guess I dreamt it? Anyway.....

Recently gmail starting protecting the users of their service, who
apparently have far less common sense than the average email user,
from phishing type emails pretending to originate from eBay. They use
some sort of authenticating method I don't recall or understood.
At pretty much that time my eBay mail ceased arriving at my gmail
account. Of course they didn't make any sort of announcement about it
so I had no idea what was going on until I wasted hours trying to find
the answer.

I'm pretty sure the forwarding part is what's causing gmail to zap my
eBay mail into cyberspace oblivion. If I forward the same mail
directly to my ISP account it arrives without a problem. I just prefer
to use gmail as then I have the mail archived.
I sent gmail a message asking about the problem. Following is their
reply:

Gmail will deliver eBay messages, unless the DKIM signature is missing
or
broken. We suspect that your forwarding service is breaking the DKIM
signature that authenticates the messages. Since DKIM supports
automatic
forwarding, we suggest contacting your forwarding service to alert
them to
the problem, and request that they correct their forwarding behavior
to
preserve the DKIM signature.

So....
Does anyone know if this is the case and/or fixable?

Thanks in advance,
Darren

[geo]

My guess is that this information is accurate. Around the same time,
I found that all of my mail from Ebay, forwarded thru e4ward, now ends
up in the spam folder at Hotmail no matter what I do.
While it's a little annoying, my plan is to just send the mail
elsewhere, where it won't be a factor. It certainly would be unusual
for Gmail to fully "not accept" the email, rather than just placing it
in the spam folder as I'm seeing. I suspect that e4ward won't be able
to include the authentication Gmail requires, since this would
effectively be "forging", in my view.


On Jul 27, 11:01 pm, 4zwune0d

[4zwune0d]

I don't know... the way I read gmail's reply was that the method used
for authenticating the email does support forwarding, so as long as
the original sender of the message is authentic it should work, but
that's being broken somewhere along the way.

And yes unfortunately gmail do zap the mail. At least as far as the
receiver is concerned as they simply bounce it back. When I was
experimenting to try to work out what was going on, there were
occasions where eBay mail I'd forwarded to gmail myself from a
different account would bounce back to me with some sort of email not
accepted message I don't recall exactly.

In the end I set up a new email account with my ISP, then had e4ward
forward the eBay mail to it. I now download that email with my usual
email client, and it has a message rule set up to automatically
forward the eBay mail to my gmail account where it sits being stored
for backups. It's a bit of a ridiculous process, but at least that way
gmail doesn't bounce my eBay email any more.

[supp...@e4ward.com]

If you having trouble receiving mail from eBay or Paypal into Gmail,
please check out the new feature 'Disable header rewrites', which
appears on the forward definition. eBay and Paypal both use DKIM to
authenticates various fields of their messages, including the Reply-To
header. The 'disable header rewrites' feature prevents a Reply-To
header from being inserted into mail sent to the alias, and this
appears to allow the messages to be authenticated in Gmail.

(We asked (eBay owned) Paypal if they would omit the Reply-To header
(which they don't use) from their DKIM signature, just like eBay does.
It appears
that Paypal 'listened', since eBay has just started authenticating the
Reply-To header as well :)

Note that when using 'disable header rewrites', your REA will not be
replaced with the alias on replies. (however an alias reply address
can still be created on the website in the forward definition, and
pasted into the To field of your reply)