I have a server which is running a social network PHP app. This app needs to send Email notifications to users and also to me (as the admin) when certain actions take place on the app. Let's say that the server's domain name is mydomain.com

I have mail for "mydomain.com" being handled by "Google Mail for Domains", so the MX records of mydomain.com points to Google servers. Thus when people send emails to "admin@mydomain.com" those emails are entirely handled by Google.

I have Postfix setup on the server to handle Email notifications sent by the PHP app. I'm not using Google's SMTP server for sending those notifications because they have a 500 Email/day limit.

So... when the PHP app sends Email notifications through the local Postfix service to users with Emails like "user@whatever.com" it works pefectly and mails are delivered, but when the PHP app tries to send an Email notification to myself at "admin@mydomain.com" it gives this error on the maillog file:

I suppose that Postfix understands that since the recipient is located at "mydomain.com" it needs to deliver that Email to a local account, but obviously not Email account exist locally on the server since the admin@mydomain.com account is actually at Google Mail.

What can I do on this case?. How can I tell Postfix to handle that Email being sent to "admin@mydomain.com" as any other Email and route it through the Internet to the servers on the MX record (Google's).

Thanks in advance,

George

Do you have mydomain set in your main.conf? I believe that if you don't set it explictly to something else it will use your local domain as you're experiencing. If you specify an alternative, e.g local.example.com instead of example.com then other emails to example.com should be sent off as normal emails.

This is indeed correct. What I don't understand is why you would use an alternative mail server when you already have a server set up to do this. in the event that changing mydomain in the main.cf file does not work please postback with the logs from /var/log/mail.log/

If there is no direct technical association, then it doesn't matter how mail is treated.

Well... that did the trick. I specified mydomain as "local.mydomain.com" and now the Emails to "admin@mydomain.com" are being delivered. Thanks for the help.

As for the question of why using an alternative Email service??... two main things: SPAM Handling and flexibility.

When you have a site with a decent amount of traffic the amount of SPAM email that you'll receive is going to be huge, and even though you can set local spam filters etc, you're still wasting bandwith and cpu power processing them. Having all Email handled by Google is a "Piece of mind" decision. Their SPAM filter are IMHO the best, and you have the flexibility of managing your email from everywhere without much effort.

Thanks,

George