The definition of SHOULD is "This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a particular item, but the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course."

I suspect viva.com didn't consider the full implications, and I suspect Google did some hard math on hours saved for their customers

And the definition of "SHOULD" (from RFC 2119) is "This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a particular item, but the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course."

Having said that, I regret my original characterization of the Message-ID header as a "requirement" and have updated the blogpost to be fair to all sides.

Thank you for bringing this up.

I suspect that Google going out of their way to make this required had a very reasonable and thought-out process, while the sender's omission was on oversight, so I haven't contacted Google Workspace support.

What's truly iffy is that GMail doesn't have the same strict requirements, and there's no way (at least that I found) to turn it off for my Google Workspace domain.

Wikipedia says Viva.com is a multi-billion dollar startup

It seems unlikely you're the first company using viva.com and using google workspace.

Clearly the problem here is that viva.com emails aren't arriving on your google workspace, despite what their support process says.

viva.com emails do arrive on other email providers, so seems unlikely to be problem with your viva.com account

It seems unlikely workplace blocks all viva.com emails otherwise more than you would have complained.

Whether that's viva's problem or google's problem is a separate problem.

Thank you! I added a screenshot of the Google Workspace Admin log screen... just becuase.

Would you mind scrolling to the end of the post? Or, if you're in a hurry: https://atha.io/_next/image?url=%2Fstatic%2Fblog%2F2026%2Fvi...

https://support.google.com/a/answer/2618874?hl=en

I've added a screenshot at the end of the blog post just to clarify that.

What test email?

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

SHIBBOLEET. I was seriously thinking of this when I contacted them :)

Thank you for the recommendation! That I couldn't sign up using a form and I had to "talk to their team" was a turn-off for my (extremely extroverted) self.

That usually means you can't afford it unless you have people working for you that do the 'talk to the team' thing.

As a European (who spent 15 years in the US), I coudln't agree more. And while I agree, at the end of the day, I just want the better product for me.