Forwarding email to another address

You want mail to info@ to land with one person, or an old address to keep working for a while. There are three solutions, and the choice decides how much trouble it gives you later.

Alias, forwarding or a real mailbox

• An alias is an address without its own mailbox: mail to it arrives in an existing mailbox. This is usually the right choice for role addresses such as info@ or billing@, and with us an alias costs nothing extra.
• Forwarding sends incoming mail on to an address outside your domain, for example a private address at a large provider.
• A real mailbox has its own inbox and its own password. Needed as soon as someone also has to be able to send from that address.

How to set it up

1. Decide which of the three you need. If mail has to be sent from that address, you need a mailbox — an alias or forwarding rule cannot do that.
2. Create the alias or the forwarding rule on the address that receives the mail.
3. Switch on keeping a copy if you forward. Without a copy nothing is left on your own server, and that mail is then no longer in your backup either.
4. Test with a message from outside, not with a message from yourself to yourself.

Careful when forwarding to a large provider

If you forward to an address at Gmail, Outlook or another large party, your server sends on a message that originally came from someone else. The checks that stop spoofing — SPF in particular — can no longer add up, and the receiving party may put the message in the spam folder or refuse it. That is not a mistake in your settings; it is how forwarding works.

To be sure your mail arrives, use a real mailbox on your domain and collect it over IMAP rather than forwarding everything. For bulk sending such as newsletters or automated shop mail, an SMTP relay is the right route — that runs through our sister brand 2Mail.

And avoid the loop

Never forward address A to B while B forwards to A. The message then bounces back and forth until the server steps in, and in the meantime nothing arrives.