Hi Kevin. Can you please post the headers for that message? Thanks.

Any news on this? I've still got users that get their trusted senders blocked because of DKIM fails / DKIM_none. Making changes to every domain filter weights is a workaround but causes problems when you need to propagate new filter weights to everyone.

This new behavior of Smartermail ignoring trusted sender is really making huge trouble for us.

Would appreciate a response from Smartermail team.

Hi all,

Even if a user or domain is on your trusted senders list, SmarterMail will still do some basic checks to ensure the sender is actually the sender. While some email systems allow trusted senders to be delivered to a user's Inbox without any validation checks, that can lead to major issues. As it is, anyone can write any return path that they want when sending a message. Spammers know this and can exploit mail servers that have implicit trust and flood users with hundreds and hundreds of messages that aren't truly from a "trusted" sender. This jeopardizes the security of that mail server.

Therefore, SmarterMail will always run SPF and DKIM checks to guarantee the return path of an email. Using SPF and DKIM checks, even on trusted senders, allows SmarterMail to reverse the domain and IP address that sends a message to make sure they match. If they do not, there is a very good chance that someone is impersonating the sender, which invalidates the trusted status. Even if the message isn't actually spoofed, that sender's domain has SPF and/or DKIM mis-configured. Services like Gmail, Office 365, Yahoo and others, are beginning to enforce strict implementations of security measures such as SPF, DKIM and even DMARC. So sending domains with incorrect set ups in any of these areas will see more and more issues when sending messages. Administrators need to be aware of this and ensure that their servers and domains are set up properly to avoid any delays in sending mail.

I understand you'd prefer an option to override this functionality, without needing to whitelist the sender's IP address. I will add this request to our discussion list and provide an update when it is available. 

Can we get status update on this issue ....all the company is wasting their time going to the spam folder to move emails ....we meed immediate resolution 

Hi,

We are facing this issue since we upgraded to 16.x and thought it might be because of our misconfiguration.  Now seems it is a bug since more users complains are there.  Can Smartertool support this takes very seriously and  give us a fix asap.

The fix for these issues will vary depending on the individual use case. In the original user's posting, trusted sender email was going into the junk mail folder due to those messages failing very basic antispam checks:

While I understand the desire to disable these checks on trusted senders, this could also be leveraged by spammers to flood your inbox as well. A spam agent would only need to identify a trusted sender on your server in order to bypass your spam checks. In this case the resolution is to correct the issues causing SPF and RDNS checks to fail, at which point these messages should be delivered to the inbox successfully. This is the expected functionality of SmarterMail, and you'll need to get to the bottom of why these spam checks are failing. If you need help doing so, please don't hesitate to reach out to our support team as we'd be happy to help narrow this down.

So bottom line is that trusted senders is not actually working unless all the conditions are perfect.

I thought the purpose of the trusted sender function is to bypass any spam filtering issues.

But if the solution is to correct the senders emails server I think its a huge fail.

Heimir,

The idea here is that these methods (SPF and RDNS) are used to track down spoofers, and I doubt you want spoofers to have free reign to make it past all spam checks based solely on being in someones trusted senders list.

I do agree it can be frustrating, and maybe we should have the ability to disable that, but this ultimately is the result of lazy admins who don't want to configure their end correctly. Someone failing SPF needs to resolve that, and if we give in to requests to 'whitelist us so we make it through' then those lazy admins can just continue to be lazy.

I get that but whats the point of having a trusted sender if its not just that -  a trusted sender.

Now its a trusted sender only if the mail server is set up correctly.

Might as well just remove the trusted sender options since its not actually working.

The way SM works is correct -- need to validate address is not spoofed before it can trust.

But here's how to bypass:

Hi all,

Indeed, the way that SmarterMail works right now is correct and us that are concerned with making sure only legitimate email flows to/from our servers would like to keep it it this way.

We`ve had enough trouble in the past with scammers exploiting the Trusted Sender functionality of SmarterMail and thus being able to send emails to the users pretending to be one of their Trusted Senders, when in fact they were sending from totally different addreses and domains. Please see this thread: https://portal.smartertools.com/community/a91739/spammers-impersonation-of-users-what-should-i-do.aspx

The pure and simple fact is that any email system in this day and age should have proper SPF and DKIM set up - otherwise the basic identity of the sender cannot be validated. Do you want to have SPAM/dangerous emails sent for your someone impersonating your own mom (which is probably a Trusted Sender) if they failed basic identity checks like SPF DKIM? I am sure you do not.

Just because an email is presented in the FROM field of a mail envelope, this does not mean that the mail is coming from that email - so how do you know if it`s the Trusted Sender you have in our address book?