I read this article on Slashdot, Gmail, SPF, and Broken Email Forwarding?, which explains how email forwarding to Gmail and possibly other service providers may sometimes silently fail.

Background: Like many people, I have me@mydomain.com as my public facing Email address. When Email comes into my server, I forward it to me@gmail.com. But since my friend has published SPF (Sender Policy Framework) records that say only his server is allowed to send Emails for friend@frienddomain.com, gmail apparently rejects (silently buries actually!) the Email since it is forwarding through my server. Please note that this is exactly what SPF is designed to prevent — spammers from sending Emails with your address — but it breaks forwarding and has other problems.

I also do what the author above talks about, i.e. I forward the email for my various domains to my various Gmail accounts.  Hopefully this is not an issue, that no one who emails directly to my domain email addresses is using SPF.

One proposed solution by a Slashdot poster makes sense, use Google apps.  Fortunately this is available for free on Dreamhost, my web host, and is easy to set up.  I might try it later.

Is there another solution?

Yes, of course. Have all your email sent to Google in the first place! You don’t have to switch everything over to the Google app tool, you can just set MX records for your domain pointing to them, and collect it all (or forward it inside or outside Google.) It’s free (with a paid version available.) Check it out here Smart apps for email, documents, sites and more