Change to Authorized Email Senders for App Engine Email API

[Karolína Netolická]

Dear App Engine users,

We are making a change to the App Engine Email API that affects which email addresses can send email on behalf of the application.

In the past, the email address of any of the Owners, Editors or Viewers of an application could appear in the “from” field of an email sent by the app, allowing the application to send email on behalf of any of its Owners, Editors or Viewers.

We recently separated the concept of Owners/Editors/Viewers and Authorized Email Senders. If you would like to use the email address of a project Owner, Editor or Viewer as the “from” address in an email sent by your application, the Owner/Editor/Viewer’s email address now needs to appear on the Email API Authorized Email Senders list.

To prevent breaking existing email campaigns, we have pre-populated the Authorized Senders list with the email addresses of all Owners, Editors and Viewers on the project. As a result, your existing email campaigns should continue to run normally. To verify that your existing campaigns will not be affected, you can check that the Authorized Email Senders list for your application contains the address you send email from.

In the event that you do notice issues with your emails, all you need to do is add the “from” address of the email to the Authorized Senders list. To prevent email spoofing, there are some restrictions on who can add whom to the Authorized Senders list; they are documented here: python, java, go, php (the logic is the same in all cases).

Thank you,

Karolina (App Engine PM)

[Christian F. Howes]

Thanks for the update!  I have some comments/questions:

 - it took me 2 different browsers and about 4 minutes to find the edit button on that page.  also really concerning to me that when in edit mode i might be editing other application settings and email addresses.
 - i was going to remove some authorized senders and got a warning that linked me here: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/java/mail/#Java_Sending_mail  (which was odd since I have a python project).  This concerned me that it seems i have no way to add users unless they are in a google managed domain.  While i don't need this functionality right now, it's a significant change that should be pointed out to people.

Thanks,

Christian

[Anastasios Hatzis]

I have a question regarding the recent changes. I currently use our nor...@mydomain.com as authorized sender, which is not a user account, but a Google Group in our Google Apps domain.

Is a Google Group, e.g. suppor...@mydomain.com, inside our Google Apps domain a "valid account" or "user"? Or does it only work because I fortunately named the group noreply in my setup?

The updated documentation states, that nor...@mydomain.com is allowed as long as it is a "valid account". It also says, that Google Apps admins can add "any user" in their domain. The wording suggests that groups are not supported.

[Zeehad (Cloud Platform Support)]

Hello,

@Anastasios

- For any group created inside a Google Apps domain, the owner of the group will be able to add it's address to the authorized senders list as long as they are either the editor/owner of the Cloud Platform project.

- For nor...@domain.com (be it a user or group) inside a Google Apps domain, any user of the domain can add it's address to the authorized senders list as long as they are either the editor/owner of the Cloud Platform project.

@Christian

- The 'Sending Mail' topic is exactly the same for Java and Python API. I believe this is why the Java documentation was randomly linked to the warning you've received inside the console. Also the App Engine Application Setting is independent.

We appreciate the feedback both of you have provided about the documentation and functionality. If you'd like to submit a feature request about any aspect of App Engine including Mail API , you can do so here.

I hope it helps. Cheers!

[Anastasios Hatzis]

Zeehad, many thanks for the clarification!