Cloudiance subscribes to the Sender Policy Framework (SPF), which is a standard that Cloudiance, and more and more other email providers support. The reason we support this standard is that it materially reduces illicit email, including spoofing, spam, and phishing.
Cloudiance has supported this standard since 2010 for outbound emails, and implemented it for inbound emails in October of 2021.
While the benefits to all customers for whom Cloudiance hosts email are material, as with any security technology, there is a trade-off between usability and security, and for some users, in some situations, there are some prospective downsides to the adoption of SPF.
The common downside is that email forwarding is not supported. By email forwarding, we specifically mean the kind of pass-through forwarding where the “from” address remains unchanged. For instance, if you have a mailbox at yourname@yourotherprovider.com, and you receive an email there from yourclient@yourclientsdomain.com, we do not support the (pass-through) forwarding of that email with its yourclient@yourclientsdomain.com “from” address unchanged, to any mailbox hosted at Cloudiance.
This pass-through forwarding is explicitly different from re-mailing, where you simply forward an email from one mailbox to another by selecting the “forward” option from within a mail account. In other words, while we do not support forwarding with the “from” Address yourclient@yourclientsdomain.com, by using re-mailing, the “from” address would be from yourname@yourotherprovider.com, which is supported.
For more information, please see our Best Practices article on the subject:
[Email pass-through forwarding: do not use it](https://admin.cloudiance.com/knowledgebase.php?action=displayarticle&catid=4&id=85)
Friday, October 1, 2021
