TL;DR: Viva.com, one of Europe's largest payment processors, sends verification emails without a Message-ID header — a recommendation of RFC 5322 since 2008. Google Workspace rejects them outright. Viva's support team's response to my detailed bug report: "your account has a verified email, so there's no problem."
this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2026
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I had a company I was doing business with reject a valid email address of mine because it contained a "." character in it. I got an error message about this being invalid email address to use. My "first.last@emailprovider.com" address had no problems sending/receiving emails with anyone else.
There should be some simplified standard way to identify what combination of email configuration is/isn't supported by companies and email providers. This can also future proof against future changes in email configuration changing over time due to the ongoing fight against spam.
There's already a standard that defines what is an acceptable email address. And an standard reply for a rejected email address.
The issue is you're dealing with a misconfigured or inappropriate email stack.
Yep. This happens when some idiot tries to roll their own regex. I've also seen them frequently reject my+email@domain
Email address regex: '.+.+'
Joke, here's some reading on it. Basically, E-Mail address can have almost any form and you better use a library that doesn't use regexp parsing.
My favorite is when you do “first.last+company@domain.com” and they come back saying it’s an invalid email. But “first.last+somethingelse@domain.com” works just fine. Meaning they are looking for their company name in the email and hard failing on it.
The one I am thinking of in particular also failed with “company@domain.com”.
I'm actually surprised that this post is two hours old and nobody on Lemmy has blamed Google for implementing the required standards or called for OP to host their own mail server themselves on a self hosted European instance.
Jeez, what happened?
Self hosting email is one of the few “you likely shouldn’t self host this” things out there.
I blame the processor on this. Yeah the whole debate on if it is mandatory by the rules is there but common. Your a major business. You want your things as properly done as possible including email.