Google Apps and Email Groups

We at n-Coders use Google Apps for scaling our business operations. One downside to this Google usage is the lack of diagnosis / troubleshooting techniques.

While chasing down bugs as to why our monitoring solution failed to alert us of issues by sending them to the group email support@n-coders.co.uk; I came to the conclusion that no system administrator wants to say:

This is Google’s problem.

I probed at the issue by sending many emails from the command line to try and get postfix to throw a wobble but it didn’t. It merely reported happily:

relay=aspmx.l.google.com[74.125.133.26]:25, delay=0.16, delays=0/0/0.07/0.09, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent  

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Everything looks fine …

Anyway, after much investigation I came to the conculsion that our SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record was incorrect and stopping emails getting through. However, I could send emails to my own n-Coders email account just fine.

Conclusion

Google drops everything heading towards a group email if it fails the SPF check. But it will allow the email to go through to normal user email accounts without flagging the email as spam.

Tips

You can check the SPF status of any email you receive by viewing the original.

In Google Mail: Go to the drop down caret in the top right of the message body and select Show original