Send email from server to gmail using postfix

Oct 7, 2009 email linux

This post is more than 18 months old. Since technology changes too rapidly, this content may be out of date (but that's not always the case). Please remember to verify any technical or programming information with the current release.

The other day I ran into this problem where postfix insisted on delivering mail… as it was supposed to do! As it was configured! But this isn’t what I wanted. Let me explain what was happening:

I have a machine called ws1.domain.com. It’s in the domain.com network. The mx record for domain.com points to gmail apps. When ws1 tried to send out mail to [email protected], it would deliver it to the local email box. This is not what I wanted - I wanted it to leave the machine and go to the gmail box. Everywhere else worked fine.

After some mistakes, I finally realized where the culprit lived…

In main.cf, the following variable was set:

mydomain = domain.com

This was as it was supposed to be. But, later on in the file, the following line existed:

mydestination = $mydomain, localhost.$mydomain, localhost

This was what was causing the local mail to be delivered locally. I removed the variables like such:

mydestination =

And now everything works. Yay.