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We receive 12 emails daily from a vendor that supply data for management required reports. We originally set up a Gmail account to receive these messages which are processed by a CRON job. We discovered early on that the messages were never recorded as received by the email client, so we had them sent to another account and then auto-forwarded.

This worked fine for a lot of months, then suddenly, a few months ago, messages that were auto-forwarded were randomly being rejected (the number of messages rejected has increased, but occasionally one or two still get through.) Interestingly, when we forward the messages manually, they go through just fine.

Since we owned the account that was doing the auto-forwarding, we received the bounce backs. The bounce message from mailer-daemon@googlemail.com was comprised of a graphic of a stop light with the red light lit, and the text:

Your message to destination_email@gmail.com has been blocked. See technical details below for more information.

Below that is the technical details:

The response was:<br />550 5.7.1 [209.85.220.41] Messages missing a valid messageId header are not accepted. s198-20020a632ccf000000b0042a2fdfda1csor3403081pgs.60 - gsmtp

When we look at the header of the original message received from the data vendor we see this is the message ID:

<6302575f.810a0220.ceb0b.5763SMTPIN_ADDED_MISSING@mx.google.com>

When we forward the message manually (which are always received), a complete message ID is included in the forwarded message.

We asked the vendor to either update their SMTP server to include a message ID, or programatically add a generated message ID (e.g., using a library such as Python has) so that their messages were compliant with the RFC, and were told that for security reasons they cannot do that. So we are on our own.

Please note that we cannot just put a rule into the receiving Gmail account telling it to accept these messages, they are never received by the client, they are being blocked at Google.

Is there a way to tell the Gmail servers for this account to ignore the message ID? Or is there another way we can work around this?

Matthew Tomsho
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  • Guess: ask your client to use Google's SMTP server when sending email, since it appears that server will add a Message-ID if required? – Barry Carter Aug 21 '22 at 18:11
  • Thanks, but not a client, a vendor, and based on the response from their support, they do not see this as their problem or an issue they need to address. – Matthew Tomsho Aug 21 '22 at 22:57
  • There used to be a way to turn off google's spam filtering (by creating a filter for 'is:spam'), but I don't think it's possible any more, and I'm not sure it ever worked for messages rejected at the SMTP level. You could use a throwaway non-gmail address and have it forward to your gmail address? – Barry Carter Aug 22 '22 at 11:55
  • Yeah it is definitely at the SMTP server level. I like the idea of the throwaway non-gmail address and then forward from that (provided it properly adds the messageID) I was just hoping that I could resolve this through Google, the more steps, the more points of failure, and the more I have to check to ensure the reports are delivered daily (Monday-Sunday) – Matthew Tomsho Aug 22 '22 at 13:13
  • I'm sure you're familiar with services like ifttt.com which may help. For throwaway forwarding addresses, I use mail.com though there are zillions of other choices – Barry Carter Aug 22 '22 at 13:40

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