When your Gmail (or Google Apps Mail) account is configured to forward to another email address it does not forward emails sent from itself to itself. For instance, say example@gmail.com is configured to forward email to me@gmail.com. If you send an email to example@gmail.com from example@gmail.com it does not get forwarded. It doesn’t matter whether this email is sent from within the Gmail interface or using the Gmail SMTP servers.
Knowing this little fact would have saved me several hours of frustration this evening as I tried to figure out why my server refused to send emails. It turned out that it was sending emails, but they were piling up in my Google Apps account instead of forwarding on. This was because I was using my Google Apps email address both to send the emails and to test the email function. Only when I happened to log into the account did I discover what was happening.
Tags: email, forward, frustration, Gmail, SMTP
Thanks for letting us know, so we can correct the problem with our mail forwarding