HELP- Third Party Spoofing Site Blocking Google AutoCrat Emails

[in...@tinytechieteacher.com]

I am desperately hoping someone can help. I would be forever thankful. I will be honest and admit that I am in Educational Tech (not Informational), so my understanding is limited compared to IT professionals. Here's the short story: 

My school uses the Auto Crat Add On within Sheets and the trigger emails to send PDFs of the info. We use Outlook for email. Our school has recently started using Mimecast third party spam/ filtering software. Now, all AutoCrat trigger emails are being blocked. I've contacted our IT department to see how they can help and the info below is what they're asking for and also what the email error looks like . Can anyone help? Any work arounds? If we aren't able to use AutoCrat via Google... I'll have to redo our entire system before school starts back. Feeling the panic. Thank you for reading and for your time! 

Message from IT: 
The issue that we are going to run into for this solution is that Google is wanting us to allow all of their mail systems to spoof a school address, which opens the school up to several potential attack vectors. Per our third party partner, if we can get a static IP address (or addresses) that I can open up your messages wont be blocked. Do you have any contacts that you can reach out to?  

Error we get when AutoCrat tries to send:

 Subject: Undeliverable: AutoCrat could not run

 

Mes sage blocked
Your message to x has been blocked. See technical details below for more information.
LEARN MORE
 This link will take you to a third-party site
The response from the remote server was:

550 Rejected by header based Anti-Spoofing policy: x
- https://community.mimecast.com/docs/DOC-1369#550[Ca8Nq6gyP3e2dulQV7VXj= w.us403]

• Attachment: AutoCrat could not run.eml (3.39 KB)  

[asm...@newvisions.org]

Hello,

Autocrat does not have its own IP address because it makes use of Google's network of IP addresses.(This add-on is built on the Google Platform, using app script and Google mail servers to complete the mailing actions.)  

When Autocrat pushes out an email from your spreadsheet it sends the email on behalf of your account but these are emails are run by a script and will use whatever Google server is available at the time to send it out. The server can change from email to email but it is always a Google server. My understanding is that there is not a set list of Google IP addresses' you can whitelist. 

You should check this with Google Support/ Mimecast Support but I would guess that means all Gmail addresses would need to be whitelisted which I understand is an issue in terms that it leaves you open to all Gmail spoof emails.

Apologies that I do not have specific steps to resolve this issue, many times email filtering software does not play nice with Autocrat or other third-party add-ons that use app script triggers to bulk email.  I hope with some of this information you and your IT department can brainstorm other solutions that could work with your domain's email security requirements. 

Best of luck in getting this issue resolved. Please keep us posted on your progress.

[in...@tinytechieteacher.com]

Oh dear. I was really hoping this wasn't the case. Not sure what to do now. I did reach out to Google Support but they said to contact AutoCrat community/ developers for ideas, as it was an add-on. 

[Kathryn Laster]

Hi, did your problem ever get resolved? I've recently encountered the same issue (I don't know if our org. uses the same filtering software) but our IT department says the same thing, that it's an "Office 365 spoof blocking issue." I'm looking for any information or direction to help them! I can see in my Gmail sent folder that the email and certificate have been generated, but the email is blocked by Outlook. 

Thank you!!