Over the past few years, email providers have been employing more strict security measures which has created a number of issues for our community members taking advantage of ubuntu and flavour email aliases. Beyond email communications getting incorrectly flagged as spam, our current configuration lacks proper user verification and has no SMTP functionality.
This issue primarily affects official Ubuntu and flavour Members who are given a unique email alias as an exclusive membership perk. There is also a number of current and former Canonical employees who use these aliases in their communications. We’ve been working with the Canonical IS team and some community leaders for the past few months on providing a long term solution for this problem and are excited to share an update:
What’s changing
We’ve been working with ForwardEmail to provide a more robust and secure solution. As a result, our members will soon see the following improvements:
- Ability to set their SMTP password from a web admin panel.
- Ability to control their redirection email address from the admin panel.
- Ability to send emails from their ubuntu.com / flavour alias through an authenticated SMTP server.
- Anti-spam measures enabled by default on all Ubuntu flavors domains.
- Ability to access mail logs related to their own alias.
- Proper DMARC, SPF, DKIM to prevent spoofing and spam control. (This will be enabled once members who wish an email alias have gone through account setup, within a deadline - to be communicated after a test phase)
- Easy administrative management via Launchpad groups.
Who is affected
For grandfathered accounts
If you currently have an ubuntu.com alias from working at Canonical, you can opt to continue receiving emails on your Canonical email address for this Ubuntu alias, but:
- You won’t be able to benefit from the new accounts perks at ForwardEmail.net;
- You won’t be able to redirect it to your eventual official Ubuntu member alias;
- Sending emails from this address will have to happen through Canonical SMTP servers;
- Such aliases will get removed without notice, were you to leave Canonical.
We will be sending you an online form soon asking you to indicate whether you’d like to preserve your alias address going forward.
For current Ubuntu / Flavour Members
If you are a current Ubuntu / Flavour Member, you will soon be able to take advantage of your new ForwardEmail account. We will be rolling out the changes in phases which will be shared here on the Ubuntu Discourse.
For everyone else
If you are not an Ubuntu Member or don’t have a grandfathered alias address, you won’t notice any changes and no action is required. However, we hope you become future Members and can take advantage of this great perk. 
When are the changes happening
We will be rolling out these updates soon after a period of testing. Changes will be made in phases so please stay tuned to this post and be on the lookout for future email communications.