For years I've had my server forward all mail received* at one of my domains over to my Gmail address. ie:

<anything>@mydomain.com -> my.account@gmail.com

This has worked fine until a few days ago out of the blue when GMail has suddenly decided to bounce most email I'm forwarding:



Most of the advice on the url given is unhelpful given that I'm trying to auto-forward all email to my GMail, not send bulk email, but it did suggest I add SPF which I have now done:

(from zone file, domain obfuscated:)

@         TXT   "v=spf1 a mx ip4:109.74.xxx.xxx ?all"

But this doesn't seem to be working. Does anyone have any other suggestions of best practice for perfecting a setup to successfully forward all email from a domain to GMail?

Many thanks
Ben

(* = yes, I know there are a lot of wider issues with doing this but I have a specific need in this case and there is now a legacy issue to support)

Blindly forwarding all maill off-server often leads to problems like this -- receiving servers will be doing spam-detection and many will, eventually, just say no to your IP. You are a spam relay.

A better approach (IMHO) is to do spam-detection on your VPS -- at the SMTP level and at the message-content level -- and then only forward (off-server) mail that has passed.

My suggestion would be to re-work your VPS mail setup, and once that's done contact the gmail people to get your IP removed from their blacklists.

Just my $0.02

As sleddog says, you are blindly forwarding spam - this is just a bad idea.

Better to set up POP3 on your server, and then let gmail fetch the mail from you:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answ ... swer=21288

Yes, this is the alternative solution - I just wonder what kind of latency this solution has? Does anyone have any experience of time delay from messages arriving in POP account thru to them being delivered to Gmail inbox?

Thank you all so much for help so far!

Ben

I've gotten a few of these lately... most of my mail has gone through OK, but I did check each instance of the rejection and the message was clearly spam. I cranked up the filtering on my end and life seems better.

Per Google's help for the Mail Fetcher:



So, it sounds like it will poll it just often enough.

Homework assignment: figure out how to forward "known good" mail directly to Gmail, and put everything else in a POP3 mailbox.