Postfix Not Forwarding All Mail?

I am not sure if I have things setup properly on my linode instance. I setup mail with postfix and MySQL. I only have forwarders setup.

I have a number of email addresses setup to forward to my gmail account. For example, i have android@my-domain.com setup to forward to me@gmail.com. I am able to get email forwarded if I send it from mailx. I even receive the email if I send it from my work account. However, I have tried sending email there from 2 different GMail accounts and neither of them have gotten there.

I followed the linode document for setting up email with postfix and MySQL. Then I added a record to the forwardings table. I don't know if there are additional steps or not. I don't know enough about email and email servers to get it working properly (or diagnose the issue). Are there some steps I can take to diagnose my issue?

Thanks.

2 Replies

I am not an email expert, and I don't use Postfix. But two main things to check: First, there's the postfix activity log (/var/log/mail.log, /var/log/postfix*, or such). Check if there are lines inside with the timestamp matching your test email.

(Or, open the file, see the last lines, then send the email again, and read the ones that has been added since. :P)

Paste them here.

Also, common caveat: If you send an email from gmail to a forwarder (or chain of forwarders) that'll in the end send it back to the originating gmail account, it'll disappear. I don't think there's official explaination for this, but the common guess is that they checksum the message, and "realize" a copy of it is already there (in your sent items box), so throw away the duplicate silently.

Never try to send test emails like this:

me@gmail.com => user@mylinode.net (or any other server) =forwarding=> me@gmail.com.

Use

account1@gmail.com => user@mylinode.net =forwarding=> anotheraccount25@gmail.com.

Thanks for the tips. I will take a look at the logs for anything out of place tonight.

I think part of it may be what you described in the caveat. One of my test emails was being sent from the GMail account that it was being forwarded too.

Thanks.

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