Why am I missing forwarded work emails?

If your work or university email is being forwarded into another inbox (like Gmail), you may notice that some messages never arrive. This is usually not a “rule” problem or something you can fix with whitelisting.

What’s happening

Many organizations add safety labels to incoming mail. You’ve probably seen things like: “EXTERNAL”, “This message came from outside the organization”, or a security banner at the top.

Those labels are well‑intentioned, but they also change the message. And modern email security expects messages to arrive unchanged.

Why the forward breaks (even if the original email was legitimate)

When your organization forwards a message to another provider, the receiving provider runs security checks. If the message was modified along the way (for example by adding that “external” tag), those checks can fail.

When the checks fail, the receiving provider then looks up the sender’s published policy. Some senders say “if this doesn’t pass, reject it.” Providers often follow that instruction.

Why it feels random

It depends on the sender. Banks, payroll providers, large SaaS vendors, and many security‑conscious companies use stricter policies. Those are exactly the kinds of messages you notice missing — invoices, password resets, etc. But it could be anything.

It can also be silent. Some providers reject the mail during delivery without a helpful “bounce” that reaches you. From your perspective it just disappears.

Can classic forwarding can be rescued?

To keep using classic forwarding, you would have to change either:

• Every sender’s security policy,
• the receiving provider’s enforcement behavior, or
• your organization’s mail gateway rules (including those external tags).

If you can, great! But in most cases, these are giant organizations you cannot influence.

How "magic" forwarding fixes it.

MagicForward uses a different delivery pattern. You forward your messages to a special "magic" address we assign you, and instead of re-sending the message in a way that triggers those strict checks, we inject a copy directly into your inbox using scoped credentials you provide. The result is the reliability of a unified inbox without the silent drops.

MagicForward exists because this problem is painfully real. It started when our founder, physics professor Sam Gralla, kept missing important work emails. He wanted to share his solution with others, and MagicForward was born.

Want the technical details? See: Mail security: SPF, DKIM, DMARC — and why forwarding can break it.