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How to access your Alumni email account
This article explains why Alumni and Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) graduates are facing issues when automatically forwarding their emails to non-university email addresses.
This article is for Alumni and ECS graduated before 2016 that are using emails with the following domains:
- username@alumni.soton.ac.uk
- username@zepler.net
- username@zepler.org
After 2016, no new users have been added to the automatic (bulk) email-forwarding service. Details of the new alumni account can be found in the article “How to access your Alumni email account”.
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Forwarding emails from alumni or Zepler email addresses
Before 2016, Alumni and ECS graduates could request automatic (bulk) email-forwarding service to their private (non-university) addresses from:
- username@alumni.soton.ac.uk
- username@zepler.net
- username@zepler.org
The forwarding service is still active for existing users, though it is facing a small number of dropped emails. This problem happens, in particular, to email accounts on Yahoo and Virgin Media, but will happen more frequently with all providers.
What dropped emails are
A dropped email is an email that is not sent to a recipient for delivery.
When an email platform identifies an email as spam, it could remove the offering message before it reaches the recipient server. This happens to protect the reputation of the sender, and it generates a “dropped email”.
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Why this issue is happening – technical explanation
Due to several changes in the way that the Email system works, email forwarding at large is becoming increasingly problematic for service providers.
SPF and DKIM standards
There are currently two standards used to determine if emails have been modified in transit, namely Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM).
It is a sending domain’s DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) policy that determines the action to be taken by a participating mail server on the receiving end if either of the above checks fails. In addition to this, a receiving email server/service is at liberty to apply any additional email scanning they wish, which goes beyond the DMARC policy of a sending domain:
- SPF records are DNS records published by sending domains, containing a list of IP Addresses and/or hostnames of email servers that they permit to send emails on their behalf
- DKIM Records contain the public-key component of a public/private key-pair used to digitally sign emails, and allow receiving email servers to perform a DNS Lookup, retrieve the correct public key, and validate the signature included in the email
What happens during traditional email forwarding
By its very nature, traditional email forwarding does indeed alter emails in transit by rewriting the “envelope recipient(s)” header from the original address (for example joebloggs@zepler.org) to the address it is to be forwarded to, all the while leaving the “envelope sender” field untouched.
This means that traditional email-forwarding will result in SPF checks failing on the final receiving email server, as the mail will be received from an IP Address that is not in the original sending domain’s SPF Record.
This is only half of the story; in most cases, DKIM should be compatible with traditional email forwarding as long as:
- it is only the message body that is signed,
or - the “envelope recipient” header isn’t part of the signed message.
This is because most sending domains' DMARC policies will permit messages to pass if either SPF or DKIM checking succeeds.
It appears that several providers may be dropping a forwarded email on a stricter basis than the original sending domain’s DMARC policy states, as the only bounce-back errors we receive on the Alumni / Zepler platform are from emails forwarded to private accounts.
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How to avoid dropped emails using automatic email forwarding
There is not much iSolutions can do to reduce the amount of dropped emails to Yahoo, Virgin Media, or Gmail email accounts using the automatic (bulk) email-forwarding function.
This issue is happening more frequently with all email providers. To avoid dropped emails we suggest not using a Zepler email address as your main email address.
Note about the Authenticated Receive Chain (ARC)
There is a longer-term solution to the problem known as Authenticated Receive Chain (ARC).
ARC is an email authentication system currently listed as Experimental by iSolutions’ Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). We are not currently ready to implement it, although we will be periodically reviewing its feasibility.
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