Hi,
I have been running some deliverability tests to ensure that we can deliver emails from our approved (with Apple) sending domains to a private apple relay address, and that those emails make it to the Gmail inbox / user that was used to create the private relay email.
We use 5 sending domains:
- messages.homeaway.com
- payment.homeaway.com
- accounts.homeaway.com
- business.homeaway.com
- reviews.homeaway.com
I ran a test where I sent an email from each one of those sending domains to that private relay email with a "dummy test" email body. It simply contained some text and the sending domain I used to send from. I ran this test a number of times and each result was different. The first time I got 2 of the 5 emails, the next I got 4, then 2 again but from different domains, and then one time I got all 5... It's all over the place, with no pattern in sight. In addition to this, 2 emails got automatically marked as spam by Gmail.
Some relevant notes about our architecture:
- We use a third party vendor to deliver our emails: Sparkpost. But, the sending domains are our own as you can see.
- We get deliverability reports back from Sparkpost via a webhook API and all of the emails I sent were reported as delivered.
- I had our technical contact at Sparkpost review one of the emails and he found that "It looks like SPF and DMARC passed, which is good. It doesn't appear that there was a DKIM check between Apple and Gmail, which might mean that Apple did not DKIM sign the message - it is possible that this is impacting Gmail filtering algorithms."
We are mainly looking for some more consistency and visibility into the deliverability from the private apple relay to the end user's email inbox. In my opinion, we have done all of the right configuration on our side and this should have been a successful / easy test. One last note: recently Apple changed the verification requirements on domain verification to remove the file option. We have since removed all domains and re-verified to ensure that nothing funky happened after those requirements were changed.
Thanks and looking forward to a response!
-Trevor