So ive been trying to get Winlink going for a few weeks now and i think im close but not sure i fully understand the gateway side of things. Running Vara HF on a IC-7300 and i can see the RMS stations in the list, some are showing green some are grey and i dont really know what determines that. Like is grey just out of range or is the station offline or what?

Also when i connect and send a message, does it go through the RMS and then out to the internet to the Winlink servers, or is it cached locally on the gateway and forwarded later? Reason i ask is i sent a test email to my gmail three days ago and it never showed up, but i got a delivery receipt on the radio side. The connection looked clean, no errors in the Vara log, so im not sure where it broke down.

And separate question maybe - if i want to run my own RMS gateway someday, is that a separate software thing or is it all within the Winlink Express install? Ive seen mentions of RMS Relay and RMS Trimode but i cant figure out from the docs which one i actually need for HF.

The grey stations in the propagation list are ones that havent been heard recently by the system, so they might be offline or just not beaconing at the moment - doesnt necessarily mean you cant reach them, just means the map data is stale. Green means its been active and reported into the CMS recently.

Your gmail thing is almost certainly a spam filter issue. Winlink outbound to regular email addresses gets flagged constantly, especially gmail. The delivery receipt just means the message left the RMS and hit the Winlink CMS servers fine, but that doesnt tell you anything about the last mile delivery to the actual inbox. Tell whoever you sent it to check their spam folder, or better yet test by sending to another Winlink account instead of a commercial address.

For running your own gateway - RMS Trimode is what you want for HF, it handles Pactor, Winmor, and Vara. RMS Relay is more for packet and VHF stuff. They are separate installs from Winlink Express, youll find them on the winlink.org downloads page. Fair warning though, getting Trimode configured and registered as a proper sysop gateway takes a bit of back and forth with the Winlink team.

yeah the gmail spam thing got me too when i first set this up, spent like two days thinking my radio path was broken. its almost always the receiving end. i just use a second winlink account as my test destination now, way less headache.

one thing i'll add - if you're on IC-7300 make sure your USB audio levels are dialed in for Vara, that can cause weird partial connects that look clean on the surface but the packet error rate is high enough that stuff gets dropped. check the waterfall and make sure youre not overdriving it