Send email through Gmail SMTP to avoid local delivery attempts?

Question

Background

We use Google Apps for email with our domain example.com:

[ec2-user@example ~]$ dig MX example.com
…
;; ANSWER SECTION:
example.com.            300     IN      MX      1 aspmx.l.google.com.
example.com.            300     IN      MX      5 alt1.aspmx.l.google.com.
example.com.            300     IN      MX      5 alt2.aspmx.l.google.com.
example.com.            300     IN      MX      10 aspmx2.googlemail.com.
example.com.            300     IN      MX      10 aspmx3.googlemail.com.
…

On the same domain we have an EC2 instance running, with Amazon Linux AMI (Centos based). sendmail works fine for non-example.com addresses. However, for example.com-addresses, it tries to deliver mails locally, which fails for users that exist only on Google Apps. Interestingly this is despite local-host-names being empty.

Question

To avoid local delivery attempts, can we set up sendmail so that it sends all email through Google’s SMTP server (requires authentication)? Would that be a good idea? Or is there a better solution?

Additional information

• Also, it would be interesting to configure the server to send email to local addresses root and ec2-user to the Google Apps user [email protected]. I guess, we would use mail aliases for that.

• FQDN:

  [ec2-user@example ~]$ hostname --fqdn
  example.com
  

  Of course, the actual server name is not example.com. It’s another .com domain.

• As requested by @AndrzejA.Filip:

  [ec2-user@example ~]$ echo '$j' | sendmail -bt
  ADDRESS TEST MODE (ruleset 3 NOT automatically invoked)
  Enter <ruleset> <address>
  > example.com
  > [ec2-user@example ~]$
  

Answer 1

You named your server example.com, the naked domain name. Thus many programs (sendmail included) take you at your word, and consider that the local server does everything related to that domain name.

To resolve the problem, rename the host. For this and a variety of other reasons, no server should ever be named with only its naked domain name.