Fixing Error 550 when sending to/from Google Apps email
Posted on October 10th, 2008 in development | 1 Comment »
My problem was that whenever I sent an email from my boogly.net email (hosted by hostgator) to my email at celiacclub.com (email managed with Google Apps for domains), the message bounced, replying with this error:
550-Verification failed for <email>
550-No Such User Here
550 Sender verify failed (state 14).
It only happened for the boogly.net-to/from-celiacclub.com connection–emails from hotmail got through successfully. If your email isn’t working at all for communication with any email, refer to the Google Configuring MX records page and use dnstools.com to check your work. Also, make sure your SPF record is set correctly. At first I thought it was an issue because I’m running Google Apps for Domains. Thought something was misconfigured on my DNS. But it wasn’t. It took a while before I found the Gmail Troubleshooter. This told me that it was for sure the other host that was attempting to check that the user exists on Google Apps (This is supposed to help alleviate junk mail).
After exchanging emails with hostgator support, I found that the issue was with the hostgator servers’ configuration of localdomains/remotedomains. In other words, boogly.net thought that celiacclub.com was a local domain so it tried to look on its own system to validate that email address. You’ll need to modify your server’s awareness of the site. Here is a good tutorial about how to go about changing this. Of course, you’ll need to move from the localdomains to the remotedomains. Depending on your host, you might not be able to modify these files–in which case, you’ll need to get on the phone with their support and have them do this process.
One Response
Took me a while to understand what was going on when I had this problem, so I’ll explain my situation and how it was resolved. It’s pretty similar to above.
1. I migrated our site, “primary.com”, to NewWebHost.
2. I migrated our email, “@primary.com”, to NewWebHost.
3. I parked two other domains on the same account at NewWebHost, “other1.com” and “other2.com”. I did not move the mail hosting for these domains to NewWebHost, however.
When I set up domain parking for other1.com and other2.com, cPanel or some other mechanism at NewWebHost automatically added those domains to the “localdomains” context on the mail server.
So, when emails to primary.com were being verified, the system was treating them as local mailboxes, rather than as boxes on external servers.
The solution was for NewWebHost to manually move other1.com and other2.com to the “remotedomains” context.