Q: Mail forwarding to gmail doesn't appear to work

• I am forwarding my email to gmail. However, it does not appear to be working - test messages that I send do not appear to arrive.

Context

• An MIT email account
• Configured (as verified in "chpobox") to forward mail to gmail.

Answer

Changes in the MIT Spam Filtering service may be impacting this. See: Spam Filtering Known Issues

• Most commonly, the problem is that mail sent by the user from their gmail account to test forwarding will not show up in the gmail inbox. Mail sent from gmail is filed into "Sent Mail", and the new copy that arrives after being forwarded from MIT is discarded as a duplicate of this previously seen message.
  
  This can be mitigated by declaring your MIT address to be an alias:
  • Go to Gmail > Settings > Accounts and Filters
  • At "Send Mail As", use "edit info" for your MIT address
  • In the "Edit" window, select the checkbox for "Treat as an alias" Learn more
    These changes will cause messages sent as your alias account to appear in your Inbox. (It is still just one message, but it is tagged with two labels, both "label:sent-messages" and "label:inbox".)

• Sometimes, changes in email forwarding can take a while to take effect. This may happen if the incremental changes are bogged down in a large-scale change (like account deactivation in January, or removing a 2000-person mailing list in moira). The solution is to wait and try again later.

Testing tips

• A good test of forwarding is to ask a friend (or use a non-Gmail address) to send a test message to the MIT account and check that it arrives at Gmail.