This question may be related to a resolved thread.
This is in relation to a specific but not unusual setup. It assumes you’ve got:
- EE hosted on a generic LAMP host: in my case, http://example.com on mediatemple.
- Email hosted by Google Apps (or any other third party service), and custom MX records set up in the DNS zone file to point to those external servers.
- One or more EE email forms, in my case, built using Solspace’s excellent Freeform module.
The problem behavior: sending emails through the form works fine when the notify parameter is set to one or more email addresses that’s not @example.com, but never when it’s set to something@example.com. No bounce, no error, just no email arriving.
What’s happening, according to the google and mediatemple links below: the hosting server is set up to handle “local mail delivery”, that is, to intercept and route email for that domain without going out to the internet, if I’m not mistaken, which I may very well be.
The solution: turn off local email delivery on the server. Since you don’t want the server to handle email, but rather, for the script/module in question to send email to the email addresses in question by doing proper DNS lookups, etc, make sure your server does not have local delivery turned on. Below is a link to the mediatemple help file on how to do that for that company’s (dv) server accounts.
This google apps support article, and this mediatemple article explain how to disable local email delivery.
Bear in mind, this assumes you’ve set up your DNS zone file to point to google’s MX servers, as described in this article.
In closing allow me to recommend that anyone who hasn’t: TAKE REFUGE from the awful world of domain name registration, maintenance and DNS configuration, at dyndns.com. It used to be my least favorite part of my job, now I’m thinking of adding it to my list of services. I don’t work for them, they’ve just fixed something that REALLY needed fixing.
Enjoy. I spent several hours on this one, hopefully you won’t.