Intermittent problems with email forwarders

Hi,

My domain is currently hosted on GoDaddy.com and I don't actually use it to host a website but I do use it to forward emails to a group of 40 or so colleagues.

So, I have Gone to Cpanel > EMail > Forwarders and have entered multiple entries where 'address to forward' is group@mydomain.co.uk and 'destination' is to a colleagues email address ie group_member1@theirdomain.com

So, the next forwarder would be 'address to forward' is again group@mydomain.co.uk and 'destination' is group_member2@adifferentdomain.com

And so on until I have 40 entries. Then when anyone sends an email to group@mydomain it gets forwarded to all 40 entries (member1@theirdomain,com, member2@adifferentdomain.com etc etc. etc.)

Anyway, this has been working ok up to about 6 months ago, but now I am getting very intermittent reports of one or two (random) people not receiving emails that have been sent to group@mydomain.com

No error messages, no bounce backs at all. Most of the people get the emails but just occasionally one or two don't. And they are often not the same people.

So, I called GoDaddy and they tell me that forwarders are not designed to be used like this, it is very old technology, and they can't support me. Although they did applaud my ingenuity in using the system in this way! (They did try to sell me an upgrade though to something that would do the same thing but cost me more money.)

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what might be happening, and possibly a work around?

 

I'm not sure how I would do that. Can you signpost me to some documentation, or give me a rough outline of how I'd do that?

 

Thanks Mike,

Very interesting and it confirms my own thoughts. Yes, my current solution isn't nearly as elegant as it could be, (a nicer way of putting it than 'ugly'!), but it works. Or at least it did do.

The GoDaddy Cpanel interface does not have Mailman included. Which is why they were surprised I'd found a way to set up a list without paying them more money for an upgrade which would allow me to do this using something like Mailman. So I suspect you are right, they weren't interested in resolving my problem, rather than they couldn't, because they wanted to upgrade me to give me the functionality I had already created, albeit they didn't intend allowing me to do that.

But having done some more googling, I now find there is a well know universal problem with btinternet mail accounts at the moment, and possibly also gmail accounts, in that emails don't get through to the recipients but neither end gets an error message. BT appear less than interested in fixing this for their users, so I'm told. So, I'm now wondering if my problem is actually with my 'lists' or in fact the end users own email accounts. I'll need to do some more investigation here.

In any case, if I can't resolve it, I've now come across Googles own "Google Groups" where you can set lists up like the one I need for free, so if all else fails I'll switch to using that instead.

But thanks for all your help on here. It has certainly pointed me in the right direction.

Simon