Working with a client for the past two days on the issue of forwarded email. She has her email forwarded from hostgator mail servers to yahoo.

Ever since we started down this road we’ve had nothing but problems. They don’t happen every month but when an email issue rears it’s ugly head it’s like a monster. Godzilla back again.

So here we are dealing with tech support and for reason not talking to yahoo. That’s probably wise in retrospect, this finger pointing business from one company to another never works. I have to take my hat off to hostgator. They’re technical support has been cool, digging through logs, looking to find specific emails that were delayed.

Turns out that Yahoo greylist just about everybody out there. Hostgator, for some reason, especially.

The reason that the forwarder was not working for Daniel is the way he was testing it. He sent an email to testing@xxxxxxx.com from the gmail address that he was forwarding to. When it came back to gmail, gmail erased it. The email never gets to the inbox because gmail sees it as invalid. Yahoo has been known to defer email from our servers so this could be why mail is taking longer for you. Is there a specific time that an email was supposed to be forwarded and wasn’t? We can look through the logs to see what happened to it.

Now it’s interesting what he has said about gmail erasing a message. I pulled my hair out on this yesterday as well. Sending forwarded email to gmail, say for instance, steve@isighttech.com forward to steve@gmail.com, will send this email straight to the Archive.

It’s there, it’s just not in the INBOX. If you download any of that email locally or you do a search through g you’ll find it. You have to go into settings and verify that email, steve@isighttech.com in this case, with gmail before you get it in your inbox.

Anyways, long email day. Bottom line, don’t use yahoo as a business email account. And if you testing emails to your gmail account do a search for it before concluding that it never came through.