For a couple of months now, I am a very happy user of Google Apps premier. Although I am not very fond of Google Docs (I like MS Office too much I guess…), I love Google Mail. The near native support for MS Outlook, great support for mobile devices (especially if you’re on Android), combined with the large, 25 GB inbox, and a very friendly pricing of €40 per year, makes it a very hard to beat offer.

Recently however, I encountered a “feature” I was not too happy about: the “special” email addresses abuse@domain and postmaster@domain are not supported, or rather, all messages to these addresses will end up with Google. As always, Google does this for our “convenience”.

The problem of course is that i have a need for the postmaster account to actually work. By my estimation, the chance of me being able to single handedly change Google policy in this respect is close to zero, so I needed a workaround. To explain the workaround, first let me draw a picture of the old situation where Google handles all the mail traffic to the apollo-software.nl domain:

The solution I ended up using was to use a helper domain, in this case apollosoftware.nl  (without dash). I’ve set this domain up as an alias domain of my Google Apps premier subscription.

A full domain alias also has mx records that point to Google, to make sure that mail arrives at the correct location.

The next step involves severing the link between the main domain and Google apps, by way of changing the MX records into something that has nothing to do with Google. In my case, I've pointed the MX records of apollo-software.nl to the mailservers of our new webhosting provider Webstekker, who, by the way, offer excellent spam filtering on all their subscriptions. What I then did was creating one catch all address that redirects all traffic to the apollosoftware domain:

and one separate account for the address postmaster@apollo-software.nl.

finally, I set up Google mail to fetch mail from postmaster@apollo-software.nl using the POP protocol.

The cool thing is that nothing really changed, and yet i am able to receive emails to postmaster@apollo-software.nl. I can still use outlook to connect to Google Apps mail. I can still send through Google mail, i still get all mail in my Google mail box, so webmail, phone sync etc all keeps working as it should. Plus i get the extra benefit of excellent spam filtering provided by Webstekker….