Email Forwarding and Aliases

Overview

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What is Email Forwarding?

Email forwarding is exactly what it says on the tin. You can set up a forwarder so that any mail that is received from one account is forwarded to another account or even several accounts.

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Why would I need to use forwarding?

The short answer is that you don’t. Most users will never need to set up an email forwarder. However, there are several instances where they can come in handy.

Alias Accounts

You can use forwarders to set up alias accounts. For example, if your name is Robert but most people call you Bob, you can create a mailbox for robert@example.com and an alias for bob@example.com. This way you can use both mailbox names, but only need to manage one mailbox.

Or, if your community knows you by a nickname. For example, I grew up with several people everyone called Buddy. I found out later in life that none of them were actually named Buddy. You can create an email with your actual name and then set up an alias for your nickname.

An alias can also be used if you change your name, for example, due to marriage.

Team emails

If you have a team of sales people that all have their own individual email addresses, you can create a alias called sales@example.com and set it to forward to each team member’s inbox.

This is also very useful for internal emails and memos. Instead of filling up the ‘To’ field of your email with all of your staff’s email addresses, you can create a forwarder called ‘staff’. Next time you need to send an email to the whole staff, send it to staff@example.com and everyone will get a copy.

Email duplication

If you have a mailbox that receives important emails, you can set it up to forward a copy of the email to another archive account or even several accounts. Remember, if you can set up a forwarder for an existing mailbox and both targets will receive the email.

Email masking

Another good use of forwarding is to hide your personal mailbox from public view. For example, you can create a forwarder that will forward sales@example.com to bob@example.com. This way you can have the sales account on your website without putting your personal account in public view.

Former employees

If you have an employee that is no longer with your team, you will most likely want to close their email account. But what if they still have customers using their email as a contact? You would lose that business.

No worries. You can close the account as normal, but set up a forwarder for the account so any mail sent to the old account will be forwarded to whoever is taking over their role.

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What it can not do?

While forwarding is great for moving mail from one account to another, it does have some limitations.

Mailing lists

While it is possible to use forwarders for bulk mailing lists, it is not very efficient. Luckily, the Mailing List app is perfect for this use case. You can find information in this service here.

Email Sorting

Email forwarders only push the emails from one account to another, without any filtering or sorting. If you want a method of sorting emails, you may want to look into Email Plus Addressing.

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If you have any further questions, please be sure to reach out to our support staff by using our chat service in your client area or by submitting a ticket.