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Anyone who sends emails on a semi-regular basis will be familiar with them: Automatically generated replies with error messages in the subject line such as "Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender". This is how the destination server of our email informs us that it is unable to forward our message to the desired destination address.
Typical reasons for this are, for example, typing errors in the destination address or overfilled recipient mailboxes. The content of the error mails contains information on this in the form of error codes and numbers.
It is then necessary to use this error information to correct the underlying error, i.e. to eliminate any typing errors or to draw the recipient's attention to an overdue clean-up in the mailbox.
Error messages from Gmail with the error message
"550-5.7.26 This message does not have authentication information or fails to550-5.7.26 pass authentication checks. To best protect our users from spam, the
550-5.7.26 message has been blocked. Please visit550-5.7.26 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#authentication for more550 5.7.26 information. u2-20020a5d6da2000000b0020c4e4aa917si32637wrs.576 - gsmtp"
You will receive such messages if Google considers the authenticity of your domain for sending emails to be questionable. In other words: Google believes that an unauthorized third party may be misusing your domain, e.g. for mass spam mailing.
The domain does not necessarily have to be included in a spam blacklist. Google applies its own criteria here.
Anyone who frequently sends emails to GMail addresses that involve other servers outside their own domain may become the target of Google's precautionary measures.
This can happen, for example, as a result of newsletter emails being sent via third-party providers or automatically generated messages from a web application.
In order to reopen the gates to Gmail mailboxes, Google proposes various technical measures to check the authenticity of all servers involved when sending each individual message.
Unfortunately, implementing these measures is not entirely trivial and cannot be done quickly.
But what do you do if you want to send a message to a GMail address immediately, but an error message always comes back?
Fortunately, there is a quick trick to send the mails successfully anyway: If you replace the domain name gmail.com with googlemail.com, the messages will be delivered correctly.
The domain googlemail.com was used by Google for a while in some countries where the domain gmail.com could not be used for licensing reasons. At the moment, the mail domains googlemail.com and gmail.com are to be regarded as synonymous, the former redirects to the latter. However, it appears that they actually behave differently with regard to authenticity checks.
Of course, it doesn't have to stay that way. The usability of googlemail.com has basically been discontinued for some time and there is no guarantee that this method will work as described in the long term.
So this little trick is more of a workaround and not a "clean" solution. It should be essential to familiarize yourself with techniques such as SPF, DKIM and DMARC in order to implement a watertight implementation in the sense of Google.