What is Email Forwarding?
Email forwarding is a feature that automatically redirects incoming emails sent to one address to a different email address, allowing users to receive messages without maintaining a separate mailbox.
How Does Email Forwarding Work?
Email forwarding is commonly used to route messages from a custom domain address like info@yourdomain.com to a personal email account such as a Gmail or Outlook inbox. This allows businesses to present professional email addresses without needing to manage additional mailboxes. Forwarding can be configured through the hosting control panel or DNS settings.
While email forwarding is convenient, it can sometimes cause deliverability issues due to SPF and DKIM authentication failures when the forwarding server relays messages on behalf of the original sender. Modern forwarding implementations use techniques like SRS (Sender Rewriting Scheme) to mitigate these problems. For more reliable handling, using IMAP with a proper mailbox is generally recommended over pure forwarding.