It always amazes me how people can read a blog post like this one that has a clear description of the problem with a log excerpts demonstrating the problem, and then people will confidently make up a completely different scenario that was not mentioned at all and blame the problem on that.

I think that's a misunderstanding of the tale. Viva sent a "click here to verify your email" to OP. That email never arrived because Google rejected it for missing a header. OP tried to tell viva, but they don't wanna hear it because OP worked around it.

> My takeaway is that his test email bounced

What test email? I see no mention of a test email in the blog post. The mail that bounced was the one with the verification link from Viva.

What test email?

https://atha.io/_next/image?url=%2Fstatic%2Fblog%2F2026%2Fvi...

Yeah. I think email receiving is a game of exceptions… the email receivers (In the business world it’s essentially just MSFT and GOOG of course) answer to the addressees because they are the customer, and those customers will start to shriek if their inbox doesn’t receive “Important Messages.” But GOOG or MS have no leverage over the senders in this case so they just add an exception: “if IP range is just right and message fault ___ is present, fix message” (or otherwise allow)

Of course, they do have leverage over “marketing email” senders since they can block it and no one will complain, so those senders always have impeccable compliance with every year’s new “anti-spam standard.”