brain trust: email-routing question

[cellio]

Dear brain trust,

On my domain, I have email addresses that collect a local copy (i.e. I can use webmail on my domain to read them) and also forward a copy to my Gmail address. This is particularly helpful for low-volume addresses that I might not otherwise check frequently.

Today somebody with whom I'd been corresponding contacted me via another channel to report that his email was now being rejected -- by Gmail. Sure enough, the copies are sitting in my domain mailbox just fine, but there's no sign of them at Gmail -- not in trash, not in spam, just not there. Gmail seems to have decided to reject them and not even tell me.

I have questions.

1. How do I get Gmail to stop doing that, at all? If email is sent to my Gmail address, especially by my own forwarder!, I want it to show up there. In the spamtrap is fine if Google thinks it is. Silent deletion is Not Ok.

2. If I can't get Gmail to stop doing it, can I get notifications somewhere?

3. I expected the forwarding from my domain to Gmail to be a private matter between those two parties. Why did the Gmail rejection get all the way back to the sender? Why did I not receive a notice of the rejection at my domain address, which is what sent it along to Gmail? Is there something I can do, presumably via CPanel, to intercept rejections by forwarding addresses?

4. Gmail has filters, which can be used to process incoming email in various ways. I've used them to whitelist a few senders that Gmail thinks are spammers that aren't. When in the pipeline do filters get applied? I think it's after this rejection it's doing, since the message goes nowhere that I can see, but I've whitelisted this particular address now in any case.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Google has a long history of silently dropping e-mail whenever they think it's "spammy" enough, without rejecting it during the SMTP session (as they should) or bouncing it or, apparently, notifying the recipient in any way.

While this goes against the SMTP standard (see, for example, RFC 5321 sections 6.1 and 6.2), Google (and Gmail) is, in effect, a large enough provider that they can ignore the standard when they feel that doing so is convenient.

They do offer some guidance on what can be done to increase the chances of an email getting through, but if there's anything anyone (including the recipient) can do to actually ensure that messages get delivered, at least I have failed to unearth it.

[siderea]

This.

Speaking as someone who is usually the person in any conversation who is doing the most egregious and exotic things with email forwarding on the regular, Gmail is the place forwarded email goes to die.

Gmail's handling of forwarded email is so hostile, it's basically killed off the email list ecosystem, because mailing lists are basically mass forwarders with an administrative user interface. I harbor the suspicion this isn't actually a side effect of their War on Spam, noting that Google had/has their own email discussion list functionality effectively in competition with external listservs, that Gmail's policy/implementation of inbound forwards "accidentally" privileges.