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I just configured my exim mail server to forward *@mydomain.com to my gmail account. But then I found some forums mentioning this is a bad idea. Google could eventually blacklist mydomain.com.

  1. Is this really a bad idea? I guess there is nothing in the protocol to say 'hey i'm just a relay not the source of the problem'?

  2. I was previously using namecheap's free email forwarding service to do this for me. It sounds like going back to namecheap is not a solution because I could still get mydomain.com blocked by Google with this approach as well?

Eric Johnson
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  • The real question is why are you doing that? – John Gardeniers Feb 08 '13 at 08:05
  • @JohnGardeniers, so I can consolidate all emails for all domains in one account. And so I can have webmail without the trouble of installing and managing my own webmail. And so I can get my spam filtered out without having to install/manage spam assassin. And so Google does backups for me. – Eric Johnson Feb 08 '13 at 10:47
  • I don't recommend it. I tried it today, taking the extra step (recommended by Google) of registering the forwarded account via Gmail's "Send mail as..." setting. The forwarded account was set to aggressively filter via SpamAssassin in three different ways (Spam Box, global filter, and account-level filter). Even so, a few spams went to Gmail and within an hour or two my forwarding mail server was flagged on the CBL spam blacklist. Maybe SpamAssassin doesn't filter forwarded emails? Maybe a mail server besides Gmail's flagged me as a spammer? In any case, it was a mess. – Andy Giesler Aug 06 '15 at 21:27

2 Answers2

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As is so often the case, the answer is "it depends".

Primarily, it depends on how it's done. If you just do simple forwarding, and google makes any kind of reception / spam filtering / blacklist decision based on SPF, you'll break mail from every sender who advertises an SPF record ending -all (which is anyone who actually knows how to use SPF; see eg Should SPF records provided by ISPs contain "all" at the end? and the comments). If you're forwarding with SRS, this problem goes away (but getting SRS working can be non-trivial).

Secondarily, even if you can get this working fine, you've introduced an un-needed single point of failure into your email chain. If your little hosted box goes down, your flow of inbound email stops. In addition, you're right that nothing in the SMTP protocol allows a relay to in some way disclaim responsibility for transmitted content ("Hey, I'm just a relay.") - if it did, every spammer would use it, too.

Google does have a procedure for allowing you to point the MX records for your domain to the google mail servers, and have all that mail end up in your gmail account; effectively, google hosts the domain for mail purposes. I don't have a pointer to it, but I've done the MX end of things for more than one client in the past.

Since you mention that you want to forward your entire domain (*@mydomain.com), I'd strongly recommend that you investigate pointing your MX records at google. This gets round both the forward/blacklist problem, and the single-point-of-failure problem.

Community
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MadHatter
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    Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought you can only point your MX records at google if you have a google apps account which I don't want to pay for. – Eric Johnson Feb 08 '13 at 10:30
  • Thanks! So it seems like its doable if I put in the effort to get SRS and spam assassin working? Basically everything gmail is supposed to do for me. Even then I have an extra point of failure and new place I have to go to find lost emails that got categorized as spam. I guess I will go with dovecot as my solution unless your MX idea is somehow possible. Dovecot was fairly easy to set up thankfully. – Eric Johnson Feb 08 '13 at 10:40
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You can do it but before read the official Best practices for forwarding mail to Gmail guide. It will help you to avoid blacklisting.

Stone
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    Thanks for your answer. From what I've read you can still get blacklisted even though you follow that guide if you get a lot of spam emails. Because Google has no way of knowing if you are a spammer or a relay. – Eric Johnson Feb 08 '13 at 10:43