The Cloud Services environment provides two separate SMTP related services: outbound mail sending for all Cloud VPS hosts via the mx-out0{1,2}.wmflabs.org hosts, and inbound/outbound mail for Toolforge via the mail.tools.wmflabs.org service.
Both sets of mail servers have had a long list of historic issues related to modern internet practices of validating message origins/senders to combat spam. Historically these issues have been addressed (or not) on an ad hoc basis as active issues arise. As is often the case with this approach to maintenance of shared systems, once the active event is resolved (or the reporter gives up) the follow up tasks linger and rot in the global backlog. It feels like it is time to actually bundle these tasks together along with a bit of purposeful design to try and dig us out of this tech debt.
See also
- T249114: E-mails from noreply@pypi.org to tools.pywikibot@tools.wmflabs.org are not forwarded to certain recipients due to SPF
- T120210: tools-mail: check SPF of sender before forwarding email
- T120225: Toolforge: correctly envelope forwarded email
- T235401: Emails from discourse-mediawiki.wmflabs.org softfail SPF
- T208281: Set up SPF, DKIM, etc. for new cloud MX servers
- T104733: Set up A-based SPF for tools.wmflabs.org
- T87338: Mails through deployment-mx SPF & DKIM fails
- T55101: Set up SPF/DKIM for tools.wmflabs.org
- T104871: Mails from tools are being marked as 'spam' by gmail
- T137160: Outgoing mail to wikimedia.org not working on new labs instance
- T53359: tools-mail doesn't deliver mails