8/20/23

When I got my new email assigned to my domain through GoDaddy, I was excited to use it, but first I wanted to set it up to forward all my emails to the Gmail account I use regularly.

This proved harder than expected. Whether I tried to forward to a Gmail account, or an old Hotmail account, I kept getting bounce backs with this message: Your message wasn’t delivered because the recipient’s email provider rejected it.

Looking further into the error, I discovered that the recipient wasn’t actually the problem (besides, Outlook runs Hotmail now, so why wouldn’t they get along?): Remote server returned ‘550 5.7.520 Access denied, Your organization does not allow external forwarding. Please contact your administrator for further assistance.

Well. I am my own administrator, so I contacted the Google machine for assistance. After reading through enough blogs and Reddits to realize this was a fairly common problem, I sorted through how-tos on Youtube until I found one that fixed the problem.

Here it is:

I did get an error when I tried to change the policy, which is addressed in this video, but his solution is super complicated. For me, what worked was that I closed it out and opened it again. Then I got a message to wait 24hrs, and the next day it worked fine. So, I don’t know how necessary the Power Shell solution is, since I didn’t do it.

Once the policy changed, I was able to forward my email from Outlook to Gmail either by using Forwarding or Rules under Outlook’s settings menu. (I previously also tried telling Gmail to import from my domain, but I never got that to work.)

I did discover that if I wanted the email to forward from Outlook to Gmail and then on to another Gmail account (don’t ask me why I have so many), it worked better to change the Rule. When I only set up Forwarding, the email forwarded to the first Gmail account, but didn’t go on to the second, even though I have the first Gmail account set up to forward everything. This is the quickest tutorial I found on using Rules for forwarding, if you don’t know how to do that.

Ultimately I turned off Forwarding in Outlook and just used the Rule to prevent receiving duplicates in my Gmail.

Hope this saves somebody some time!