Gmail has been busy making some changes lately, and not all of them are under the hood.
One of those changes is to their user interface. If the From: domain doesn’t match the domain of the sender, then Gmail will now display the domain of the sender as well after a “via:” notation. So, the new format will look something like this:
Sender Name [email protected] via example.com
Here is Google’s explanation of the issue:
Gmail displays this information because many of the services that send emails on behalf of others don’t verify that the name that the sender gives matches that email address. We want to protect you against misleading messages from people pretending to be someone you know.1
And the way to get rid of the “via” statement? Authenticate. Seriously:
Gmail checks whether emails are correctly authenticated. If your messages are sent by a bulk mailing vendor or by third-party affiliates, please publish an SPF record that includes the IPs of the vendor or affiliates which send your messages. Or, you may consider signing your messages with a DKIM signature that is associated with your domain.2
So, it’s not something I would necessarily worry about, but if you want to get rid of the “via” statement, it looks easy enough.
Footnote
- Google, Email Sender Guidelines, Google Workspace Admin Help, https://support.google.com/mail/answer/1311182?sjid=16210124451035969082-NC. ↩︎
- Id. ↩︎
About the Author
Mickey Chandler is a Consultant & Attorney with over 28 years of experience in Email Deliverability & Privacy Law. He has a strong background in email authentication infrastructure (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), ISP and mailbox provider relations, anti-spam policy and compliance, CAN-SPAM and state anti-spam law gained through overseeing the Abuse & Compliance team at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, originating the ISP relations role at Informz (now part of Higher Logic), and working in the fight against spam since 1997. He holds a B.A. in Government, a B.S. in Computer Information Systems, and a J.D. from the University of Houston Law Center. He is a certified CIPP/US professional and a certified CIPM professional.
