Sending email to googlemail.co.uk from my site.

IanSmithISA · #1 (**permalink**) 10-12-09, 05:28 PM

Good afternoon,

I had a new customer sign up to my site today and he supplied his email address as <somebody>@GoogleMail.co.uk.

I am running a Windows Hyper V VPS and the emails from my site are sent via SMTP, Emails to this address sit in the \inetpub\mailroot\queue with a delayed 4.4.7 status.

Why its delayed is fairly clear, running smtpdiag fails to locate the account. If I change the account to <somebody>@GoogleMail.com smtpdiag finds the account and the emails are sent.

So the question is a fairly simple one, anyone got any observations or suggestions?

Googling googlemail.co.uk doesn't seem to be very informative

Bye

Ian

**sysadmin** · #2 (**permalink**) 10-12-09, 08:55 PM

Hi Ian,

Does GoogleMail.co.uk work for you? It doesnt for me.. but GoogleMail.com does which in turn redirects to http://mail.google.com. I think there might have been an error/typo in supplying the email address. Can you verify the same?

IanSmithISA · #3 (**permalink**) 10-12-09, 10:12 PM

Good evening,

Thanks for your thoughts.

As far I am concerned googlemail.co.uk doesn't seem to exist, but there are references to it from a web search.

What is slightly confusing is that my site has a "customer" and "supplier" mode and the same person signed on to the customer mode with googlemail.co.uk and the supplier mode with googlemail.com.

The nature of my site is such that I sought of know who this person is, he signed up as a result of me going to his business premises to explain the service, this makes me believe that this is not just a "wind up".

I have contacted him directly but have not yet had a reply. I am quite happy to translate all googlemail.co.uk to googlemail.com email addresses if this required but it is a new problem to me.

It is very clear in my mind that this is NOT a problem with WHUK hosting, but I am curious because it has come up as one of my earliest customers. I am trying to work out if I am at fault because I should know how to respond to a googlemail.co.uk address or if I can reasonably say to the customer "Ohhps, it's your fault, there is no such email address".

I still have an old Freeserve <me>@<my business name>.fsbusiness.co.uk address that still works, I'm not sure that Orange really like it, but.........

Bye

Ian

**sysadmin** · #4 (**permalink**) 11-12-09, 03:06 AM

Hi Ian,

googlemail.co.uk, googlemail.com, gmail.co.uk & gmail.com are registered by Google having the following name servers:

Code:

Name Server: NS1.GOOGLE.COM
Name Server: NS2.GOOGLE.COM
Name Server: NS3.GOOGLE.COM
Name Server: NS4.GOOGLE.COM

It seems that the company has stopped googlemail.co.uk & gmail.co.uk. Only googlemail.com, & gmail.com are working at the moment.

I've done certain investigations on this & have come to a point that, if you email someone@googlemail.com or someone@gmail.com, it reaches the same mailbox.

It's just that neither someone@googlemail.co.uk nor someone@gmail.co.uk work.

Furthermore, here's a part of the investigation:

Code:

[root:~]# dig gmail.com MX +short
5 gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
40 alt4.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
20 alt2.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
10 alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
30 alt3.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.

[root:~]# dig google.com MX +short
10 google.com.s9a2.psmtp.com.
10 google.com.s9a1.psmtp.com.
10 google.com.s9b2.psmtp.com.
10 google.com.s9b1.psmtp.com.

[root:~]# dig googlemail.com MX +short
20 alt2.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
10 alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
30 alt3.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
5 gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
40 alt4.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.

[root:~]# dig gmail.co.uk MX +short

[root:~]# dig googlemail.co.uk MX +short

The last two don't have any answers..

IanSmithISA · #5 (**permalink**) 11-12-09, 06:32 AM

Good morning,

Thanks for the further information.

I have decided that I will treat googlemail.co.uk like any other non existing mail address rather than do special case processing for it.

It's just that having google in it got me wondering especially as far as I can see it did appear to valid once and losing customers because of something so trivial as an email address is never a good idea.

Bye

Ian

The results of smtpdiag:

.........
Checking SOA for googlemail.co.uk.
Checking external DNS servers.
Checking internal DNS servers.
SOA serial number match: Passed.

Checking local domain records.
Checking MX records using TCP: SMithTams.co.uk.
Checking MX records using UDP: SMithTams.co.uk.
Both TCP and UDP queries succeeded. Local DNS test passed.

Checking remote domain records.
Checking MX records using TCP: googlemail.co.uk.
Warning: The TCP DNS query returned no results.
Checking MX records using UDP: googlemail.co.uk.
Error: No MX or A records were found for the remote domain. Verify that the
remote domain is valid. Your firewall allows outbound DNS queries (Windows
NT/2000 Server requires TCP), and your DNS server can resolve external domains.

C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\SmtpDiag>