Gmail – How to prevent the Google Apps email from including “via” information

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In our business, we use Google Apps for all of our email, as we do not host our own mail server. As a result, most of our employees have their GoogleApps emails forward to their regular Gmail accounts, and also interact with their GApps emails through their regular Gmail accounts ("send as", etc.) as it is easier than juggling two accounts, or two signed-in browsers, etc.

One of our company directors has an issue where some of his recipients will receive his email with the "via" included, i.e. bob@company.com via bob.smith@gmail.com. This only applies to SOME recipients, and which recipients parse emails this way seems to be completely random — it's only certain mail servers that dig up the via information. The rest of the servers only see the bob@company.com email address, and that's the only address that shows up in the sender info.

A bit of poking around in the Google help center brought me here: http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1311182&rd=1
This indicates that an SPF record and/or DKIM signature must be used for the receiving mail server, in order to prevent the mail server from digging up the extra "via" information.

My question, thus: How does one set up an SPF record and/or DKIM signature from within Google Apps? Is this even possible to do?

Best Answer

Your SPF and DKIM records need to be setup in the DNS for your domain.

Google provides these steps for creating the record: To create an SPF record for a domain:

  1. Log in to the administrative console for your domain.

  2. Locate the page from which you can update the DNS records. You may need to enable advanced settings.

  3. Create a TXT record containing this text: v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all

    Publishing an SPF record that uses -all instead of ~all may result in delivery problems. See Google IP address ranges for details about the addresses for the Google Apps mail servers.

  4. If your registrar also requires a host setting (such as @), see the TXT records for specific domain providers list for precise instructions.

  5. Save your changes. Keep in mind that changes to DNS records may take up to 48 hours to propagate throughout the Internet.

Link to Google Help

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