Forwarding mail to Gmail

General Discussion
#1

I have a number of hosted sites where email is forwarded to gmail.com using an aliases file entry. Recently some mail was bounced by Gmail. I know forwarding mail is increasingly risky as spam filters get more picky, but the instructions at https://support.google.com/mail/answer/175365?hl=en suggest that it is possible and should still work.
“We recommend that you do not change the envelope sender when forwarding email to Gmail.”
Does the default email setup in Sympl comply with this?
My impression is that Gmail’s advice is a bit optimistic if the sender has set SPF - doesn’t that mean my server is suspect as its IP address isn’t the right one? Then to fix that we’re into the Sender Rewriting scheme which has been discussed recently and looks tricky to implement.

Gmail offers a facility to do a POP3 fetch from a mailbox which might be an easier way to prevent messages from being rejected. Would that be a better option?

#2

I stopped forwarding mail to gmail long ago and always put the mail in a mailbox and get gmail to pop it out.

This does result in:

  • need to access the gmail account to set this up
  • need to access the gmail account if the server settings ever change
  • a bit of a delay on mail delivery as you have to wait for gmail to check the pop mailbox. You can’t force this to happen from a mobile like you can in the desktop browser
  • the gmail spf/security info does not work quite the same as if the email was sent directly to the @gmail.com address. Therefore you can’t test you spf and dmarc settings for another mail account like you can if you send them email straight to the @gmail.com address
  • sometimes spam emails get left on the sympl server so I have a cron job to delete any read email from the sympl mailboxes, as this only happens if the email is spam that google does not want to collect. When this happens gmail puts a warning email in the gmail inbox which I have a gmail rule to automatically delete.

Otherwise it works well and i’ve had no issues with google black listing my server for forwarding on spam.

1 Like
#3

Thanks. It’s low traffic and the fetch delays won’t be a problem. I’ll give it a try.