Email Forwarding

Virtualmin
1

Hi,

I have spent the last week evaluating and learning how to use Virtualmin and now have a final production server up and running. First I want to say thanks for all the work that has gone into this truly amazing project. I have been using cPanel for a long time but their over-simplified interface and over-pricing has finally led me to find something new.

I’ve had a few issues in setting everything up but have resolved them all thanks to the documentation on this site. The only issue I have left is that email forwarding to my GMail account is not working. I’ve searched both the forums and the documentation high and low and read numerous similar issues but have yet to find a solution that works.

The problem is that I can send and receive email fine with Usermin but any time I try to set up forwarding it simply doesn’t arrive at the specified address. I have tried forwarding with aliases and also forwarding from Usermin but nothing seems to work. I can send email from Usermin to the account I am trying to forward to fine.

I have done the following things, which may or may not be of consequence:

  • Disable Spam Assassin and ClamAV
  • Used my Domain Registrar's DNS and set up A/MX records for my domains (which are working fine for everything else)
  • Set up 5 Virtual Servers all of which suffer from the problem
  • Tried an "All mailboxes" alias, specific address aliases and Usermin user forwarding all to no avail

I have also tried the following commands as suggested on a thread in this forum:

cd /etc
postfix stop
newaliases
postfix start

I feel like I’ve exhausted all the resources on this website and still haven’t made any progress. I have a suspicion that GMail are rejecting the forwarded mail because of incorrect headers/hostname/SSL cert but I don’t really understand Virtualmin enough to be sure or know how to fix it.

I am considering purchasing a Professional licence for the script installers but I would like to solve this issue first. If anyone has any ideas or suggestions I’m all ears and would be most grateful. I am sure my own ineptitude is at fault but I don’t have any quick fix for that.

Thanks,

Craig

2

Howdy,

You may want to take a look at the mail logs, those will show what’s going on.

Those are located at either /var/log/maillog or /var/log/mail.log, depending on your distro.

Then, just find the time of day where you sent the email, and the logs should show what’s going awry. Feel free to post the relevant log entries here if you’d like a hand in diagnosing them.

-Eric

3

Hi, it seems it was my ineptitude as I had expected. I was sending from a GMail account to an address on my mail server, which was then attempting to forward mail back to the same GMail account. It would seem this is disabled as a feature (either in GMail or VIrtualmin?) because mail sent from any other address is forwarded properly. Maybe it’s a measure in place to prevent forwarding loops.

I did take a look at my maillog and everything appeared to be functioning normally. There were no obvious errors about the forwarding process, it was just simply missing from the log as if to suggest I had never configured it.

After I had spent a few frustrating hours trying to figure it out, it was spam that finally saved me. I received a junk email, which seemingly bypassed this feature and landed in my GMail inbox via forwarding.

God bless spam!

Thanks for taking the time to reply and for offering your help.

Craig

4

Hi Craig,

I’m glad you figured it out! Thanks for the update.

Have a good one!

-Eric