Catch-all subdomains email

I am a bit unsure... Do you mean that the "xyz" subdomain will be disposable? I will assume so.

As you say, 1) is easy and support is built in, but 2) requires you to register the subdomain as a separate google apps account, so if you mean for that to be disposable then you are out of luck. Once you have registered the subdomain the it will be a separate account, and you can set up a catch all for that too.

Subdomains with email accounts, such as abc@xyz.mydomain.com also requires the appropriate MX (and SPF) records in DNS for that subdomain, what its parent has is irrelevant.

In short, no. I don't think what you want to do is possible.

Your Exim log seems to be indicating that the mail was correctly sent to the **gmail.com address:

2013-02-04 02:39:56 1U2Geh-0000aO-LZ => **@gmail.com <account@this.server> R=dnslookup T=remote_smtp H=gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com [2607:f8b0:4002:c02::1b] X=TLS1.2:RSA_ARCFOUR_SHA1:128 DN="C=US,ST=California,L=Mountain View,O=Google Inc,CN=mx.google.com"

Have you looked in the Exim Reject log as well? Although there's doubtful to be anything there if the main log doesn't indicate any failure.

Generally in these situations, if there's no indication in the mail log as to a failure in message delivery, it's really hard to troubleshoot on the server end. In these cases it's almost always an issue with the receiving server discarding the message for one reason or another. I've seen this happen with Gmail quite often. My recommendations:

• Have you checked the Exim queue as well to ensure the messages are actually being sent?

exim -bp

• Does your domain have an SPF record set up? If not, I would definitely recommend doing so.

• You could check if your IP is on a blacklist (I like to use MXtoolbox). However, this isn't guaranteed to fix anything, since Google isn't public on what blacklists they use (and I believe they keep private ones anyway.)

• Gmail in particular doesn't always get along with email forwarding. An alternative is rather then having your alias forward the email to Gmail, setting up that Gmail account to pick up the email over POP. You can do that as follows:

Gmail -> Gear -> Settings -> Accounts -> Add a POP3 mail account you own.

Sorry I can't offer more than this. I've dealt with similar issues dozens of times, and these are the only things that have ever helped. If there's no indication of an error on the server end, then it's really hard to figure out the issue if you don't have access to the receiving server as well. (And as this is Google, there isn't going to be any help coming from their end.)