After many many weeks of frustrating back-and-forth with Google tech support that resulted in my giving up on them and using a forum, I finally have a suggestion to fix my email issue: add SPF and DKIM records to our DNS setup. The comment was made by a person who’s been answering support questions on this forum for a long time, and they seem to know what they’re talking about.

I’m pretty blown away by this. Like yes, it’s best practice to add these DNS records for your domain to ensure that your emails are not flagged as spam or rejected and your domain is not blacklisted. But we are using Google to manage our email, and email within our organization is being flagged as spam incorrectly by Google’s own spam filter. Google does not have control over our DNS setup, but they have control over all that other stuff. They pretend to be more or less a turnkey email solution, and yet you need to do some fiddly DNS configuration, something I’d guess most people don’t know how to do, to get their email to work reliably within your own organization?

That feels bizarre.