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 is changed to yourname@yourotherprovider.com, which is supported.
To clarify, Cloudiance, as of October 2021, Cloudiance does not support the (pass-through) forwarding of emails from other providers to mailboxes, aliases or distributions lists at any domain name hosted at Cloudiance. We are not the only email provider that has adopted this rule. In fact, most forwarded messages to Google and Microsoft, for example, also get blocked by SPF.
We understand you may have been doing business for some time, even decades, using forwarding as a way to centralize receipt of your emails, and that it may be a significant inconvenience to change your workflow to accommodate our adoption of SPF. And in this case, the benefits of SPF for both outbound and inbound mail receipt greatly outweigh the drawbacks to the few businesses who still forward their emails.
We feel that the future support for SPF by all legitimate email service providers (ESPs) is assured. In essence, we believe, at the moment, that email forwarding is dead. If you still use it, you should change how you’re centralizing your email as soon as practical, as you may otherwise not be receiving some forwarded messages.
There are three primary ways we recommend you centralize your email from different domains/providers: 1) external accounts, 2) domain aliases, and 3) re-mailing.
The first, is using the built-in ability for your mailboxes to check external email accounts (webmail > preferences > external accounts), and the second, useful in the case where you may not have mailboxes to check, but instead simply have forwarders setup on a domain name, is to use domain name aliases. [External accounts: check your other mail services from Cloudiance](https://admin.cloudiance.com/knowledgebase.php?action=displayarticle&catid=4&id=78)
Aliasing a domain name to your primary domain for mail is straightforward. Here is a link to our knowledgebase article on setting up and using domain name aliases, so that your emails will come directly into your mailboxes here at Cloudiance, instead of having them forwarded. [Domain name aliases](https://admin.cloudiance.com/knowledgebase.php?action=displayarticle&catid=9&id=86)
Finally, the third option is re-mailing. This is the same functionally as if you pressed/selected the “forward” function on any particular email, and sent it to a different address. Instead of the email being forwarded without any change, the “from” address gets changed to the email address of the forwarding mailbox. For instance, if you have an account at gmail called yourname@gmail.com, any messages you forward from there will show their “from” address as yourname@gmail.com.
Would you also like to setup SPF on your domain name, to reduce spam and comply with email best practices? [SPF records](https://admin.cloudiance.com/knowledgebase.php?action=displayarticle&catid=4&id=47)
