mail forwarder "untraceable route"

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davidtorr
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I have a mail forwarder set up for the webmaster address on our site. It forwards to myself and a colleague. I have just stopped getting emails (cannot contact my colleague at the moment to see if he gets them). When I check with Trace on the forwarder page his entry is marked "virtual user to local delivery" and mine is marked "untraceable route to local delivery". Was working fine yesterday and I know there are emails sent to webmaster today because I checked that account (and yes I ave checked my spam folder!)

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Satisfaction mark by davidtorr 4 years ago

Thanks - will look into moving away from using the forwatder. Neither of the two email accounts being forwarded to are hosted on your servers. My colleague seems to get all of the emails and I have now started to receive them again!

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anonymous
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Thanks for checking in, and sorry you're running into forwarder problems. Forwarders are gradually becoming unreliable on a large scale and, over time, I'd strongly suggest that you move away from relying on them. That said, since you've already checked spam, I have a few suggestions for other possibilities. 

By any chance are you forwarding to an email address that also exists on the server/account as its own domain? The email returning 'virtual user to local delivery' sounds like it could be a routing issue. If that domain exists on the server/account, and cPanel's email routing is set to 'local,' forwarders can ignore the MX records and attempt to 'send' the mail to the version of the domain on the server, even if you are using external mail hosting. 

This would explain the 'untraceable' address as well-- if the address existed on external mail hosting, but there was not a copy of that address on the server, cPanel would keep trying to force local delivery, even to a nonexistent mail address. 

That said, that's just my best read on the situation based on similar issues I've seen before. If you check email routing and the problem doesn't resolve, please get in touch with our 24/7 Technical Support team directly. They can check the error logs on your account and figure out what is going on! 

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-1
anonymous
  • Answer
  • Answered

Thanks for checking in, and sorry you're running into forwarder problems. Forwarders are gradually becoming unreliable on a large scale and, over time, I'd strongly suggest that you move away from relying on them. That said, since you've already checked spam, I have a few suggestions for other possibilities. 

By any chance are you forwarding to an email address that also exists on the server/account as its own domain? The email returning 'virtual user to local delivery' sounds like it could be a routing issue. If that domain exists on the server/account, and cPanel's email routing is set to 'local,' forwarders can ignore the MX records and attempt to 'send' the mail to the version of the domain on the server, even if you are using external mail hosting. 

This would explain the 'untraceable' address as well-- if the address existed on external mail hosting, but there was not a copy of that address on the server, cPanel would keep trying to force local delivery, even to a nonexistent mail address. 

That said, that's just my best read on the situation based on similar issues I've seen before. If you check email routing and the problem doesn't resolve, please get in touch with our 24/7 Technical Support team directly. They can check the error logs on your account and figure out what is going on!