Google Apps email and my contact form

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cmccullough's picture

Hey all,

I have an issue that is kind of hard to describe but I'm going to do the best I can. I posted this on the Drupal forums, as well.

My consulting site, cmccullough.net, is using Google Apps for email. Google Apps uses imap and SSL. My consulting site is running Drupal 6. In my contact form configuration, I set my Google Apps email address as the address that all messages will go to. However, when someone attempts to contact me with the contact form, it will not send the message to my email address. A while back, I used e107 for my consulting site and I had the same issue. If I change the contact form email address to my personal gmail account or one of my other email addresses not using Google Apps, it works fine. Now, I'm pretty sure that the issue is with Google Apps since I had the same issue with e107 and my other non-Google Apps addresses work fine. I'm just wondering if anyone else has experienced this and if so, were you able to work around it? Could the issue be caused by the fact that Google Apps uses imap and SSL (and I don't think there's a way around this)? For now, so clients (and future clients) can contact me, I just put my personal gmail address in there and it works fine.

Any ideas or help will be greatly appreciated.

Comments

works for me

mikegoodwin's picture

I use Google apps for not2us.net and redleafmedia.com and both contact forms have worked fine for me in the past. Have you contacted Google?

-Mike Goodwin
Red Leaf Media
http://www.redleafmedia.com

Hi Mike, I've emailed Google

cmccullough's picture

Hi Mike,

I've emailed Google Apps support. Just haven't heard back from them. A couple of folks replied to my post in the Google support forums. One guy mentioned setting SPF up. Not sure what that is, exactly. I'm going to have to look into it. Does Drupal use a php mailer of some sorts or maybe Sendmail? Maybe I need to do some configuring?

Thanks for the reply

-Chad

mail function

mikegoodwin's picture

Drupal uses PHP's built-in mail() function:

http://us.php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php

in its drupal_mail_send() function:

http://api.drupal.org/api/function/drupal_mail_send/6

-Mike Goodwin
Red Leaf Media
http://www.redleafmedia.com

virtual server by any chance?

raystuart's picture

I hope you already found an answer, but in case you didn't you might want to check into your local DNS service. I'm going to guess that you have a virtual server or dedicated server setup and you have something like Webmin/Virtualmin managing your hosting setup. When it sets up your account, it assumes you want your mail hosted on your server as well (if you have it set to setup mail) so it points your local DNS for your email domain to the local server. That means that mail sent to your domain (from your server) will be "stuck" on your server and will never actually get delivered to google apps.

To check this, you can look at the mail log files on your server for some clues. To fix it, you might have to add the correct mail servers in your bind DNS for that domain so the server knows the correct place to send that mail. Or, you could stop using BIND on the server if that is desirable.

Best of luck!

Thanks

cmccullough's picture

Thanks for all the replies. Sadly, I still have not been able to resolve this issue. Honestly, I have no idea why it's doing this. I've talked with others that use Google Apps with Drupal and they have had no issues whatsoever. very strange.

Ray: Thanks for the information. I will look into this.

Thanks,
Chad

mis-configuration on cPanel

tian.hack's picture

I just resolved the same issue for myself. It turns out to be a mis-configuration on cPanel when changing the MX entries. Here are the details: http://tianbai.org/blog/2009/08/fail-to-receive-emails-with-google-apps/. Hope it works for you as well.

Tian Bai | http://tianbai.org

Tian Bai | http://tianbai.org

If anyone else has this issue

fauskanger's picture

Though this is an old post it still pops up when I google'd this issue.

Like mentioned above, setting up SPF might be one solution, and also setting up DKIM in the Google Apps dashboard:

https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/<EXAMPLE.COM>/SetupWizard#SetupWizard/se...

It's under "Advanced Tools" -> "Authenticate e-mail" (Or similar; I have it in Norwegian.)

Hope this helps someone.