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The Quirks of Gmail Ui

March 9, 2021 * 2 min * Vinh
Table of Contents

  * A Tale of DKIM signed email
          o How A1 appears on gmail
          o How B1 on gmail
          o A2 is original source of A1 email
          o B2 is original source of B1 email
  * The end

A Tale of DKIM signed email#

I run a hanami, an email forwarding service and I have a few stories
about email that I want to share. Today I want to talk about Gmail.

Gmail is a big player in email world. It dominates small and medium
startups. All of companies that I worked for has been using gmail.
Even mailgun or postmarkapp use gmail. Gmail is no doubt really
great. Their spam filters work better than Microsoft or Outlook from
what I can observe. However, gmail UI has some strange UI decision.
Today I want to tell a story about the "Via" badge.

First, we'll have a look at these two screenshots

How A1 appears on gmail#

A1

How B1 on gmail#

B1

Which one looks more trustworthy? Obviously A1 looks better. B1 has a
suspicious text "via way.hanami.run".

Now looks at these two screen shot? Which one looks more trust
worthy.

A2 is original source of A1 email#

A2

B2 is original source of B1 email#

B2

B2 is definetely better here, SPF is passed, DKIM is valid.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

The end#

Now did you know that the A2 is the header of A1 email. Somehow when
we signed a message with DKIM, google decided to show the "Via
way.hanami.run", which is technically correct because the message
lack of DKIM signature for original gmail address. An intermidate
mail forwarding service sign the message with way.hanami.run.

However, the way the UI represent it make the mail server that spend
extra effort to sign their emails looks not trustworthy, while the
message that failed both SPF and DKIM looks correct on their UI.

I hope someone at Gmail will eventually fix this and we can all start
to sign our emails with DKIM like what we do with https.

Until next time for more email story.

  * hanami
  * email forwarding

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