Alias Domain emails error 550 5.1.1 but work anyway

[OldmanJohn]

I have an Alias Domain pointing to my Primary Domain. The Primary Domain has a wildcard redirect of all email to another gmail account.

When emailing anything at the Alias Domain, the sender gets an error back, saying undeliverable as the account doesn't exist, with a status of 550 5.1.1, but, strangely, the email actually gets delivered fine.

All emails sent to the Primary Domain are correctly accepted and redirected to the final destination account, so I don't think it's an issue on the Primary Domain.

How do I solve this ?

Thanks 🙂 

[newman]

Just to clarify is this what's happening: email *@alias.com alias redirects *@primary.com, then forwards to a Gmail account ( works if initial email is sent to primary)?

Some how questions:

How are you pointing the alias at the primary?

How did you create the rule to forward the messages, default routing, address mapping, content compliance etc.?

[OldmanJohn]

As it's an Alias Domain, I believe that all mail sent to alias.com will get forwarded to the same name at primary.com, which seems to stand up to testing, as mail sent to nonexistent-user@alias.com arrives ok, though with the sender getting a bounce notification.

In Google Domains, under Email, Email Forwarding is turned on with a pattern of *@primary.com forwarding to myaccount@gmail.com - the email arrives fine at myaccount and I would be none the wiser to there being a problem, other than people contacting me to say they are getting bounce notifications.

The bounce message, from the Email Log Search page reads:

Dropped
Matched rules:
Default routing: Google Domains Email Forwarding
Default routing
Bounced
Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the server for the recipient domain domains.google.com by gmr-smtp-in.l.google.com. [108.177.119.14]. We recommend contacting the other email provider at postmaster@domains.google.com for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 550-5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. Please try 550-5.1.1 double-checking the recipient's email address for typos or 550-5.1.1 unnecessary spaces. Learn more at 550 5.1.1 https://support.google.com/mail/?p=NoSuchUser

Thanks in advance for your help 🙂

[newman]

Can you forward the alias directly to gmail account instead of going to the primary?

With Google domains you have limited insight as to what is happening.  I'm not as familiar with Google domains as Google Workspace so I'm not sure what the options are beyond going through Google support.

Someone here may have more experience with Google domains and can provide some more insight.

[OldmanJohn]

Google Domains offers 2 options - Secondary Domain, or Alias Domain. Alias has the advantage of wildcard forwarding, but, only to the Primary domain, not to an individual account.

Any idea where I go next on this issue? The only other thought I'd had was to accept all mail from the Alias to the Primary, then set up the individual account to pop3 poll the Primary to pull all the mail in, but that feels overly engineered 🙂

I get a feeling that the official fix to this would be to migrate all my external domains into the Google Domains platform, so that they are all native Primary domains, and bypass the need for aliasing.

[OldmanJohn]

As a diagnostic test, I removed the Alias Domain and recreated it as a Secondary Domain. The issue persists

[OldmanJohn]

I _think_ that I have finally worked around the problem, but I still do not understand how/why - I just kept changing settings until I found the combination that worked...

Go to the Routing page:
https://admin.google.com/ac/apps/gmail/defaultrouting
or by navigating to
Apps > Google Workspace > Settings for Gmail > Default routing

Add a regex filter with the pattern:
(\W|^)[\w.\-]{0,25}@(aliasdomain)\.com(\W|$)

Then under Route > Change route
Change from "Google Domains Email Forwarding" to "Normal routing"

That last step seems to be critical, but I've found no documentation to explain the difference. Initial testing looks good, but I have no way to know whether I'm losing mail

[michaelkatzman]

Had a similar issue and this seemed to fix it!