Email Forwarders Overview
In this article we are going to talk about how email forwards can be helpful to website owners and users. We will also discuss the dos and recommended don’ts for email forwarders.
Note: To skip all these details and jump straight to the instructions on how to set these up, simply click here.
What is an email forwarder?
An email forwarder (sometimes known as an email alias) is a way to take messages sent to one email address and forward it to another address.
Why would I want to use a forwarder?
There are many different reasons for wanting to forward emails from one address to another. Here are a few of the most common.
- 1) New Email Address
- If you just changed your email address, you may not want to miss out on email still being sent to your old address. You can use an email forwarder so that any emails sent to your old address get forwarded to your new email address.
- 2) Consolidating Emails
- We sometimes use a lot of different email addresses for different projects/people. Forwarders allow us to have as many “email address” as we want, but in reality we can have them all forward to what email address we use. This is used quite a bit for [email protected] addresses where you don’t want to list your legitimate email on the site. While you will still get all the emails sent, they will never know your real address until you reply.
- 3) Simple Email List
- Sometimes people want messages to be sent to multiple address, while you could setup an email list like mailman, if it’s just a handful of people, and you don’t need all the options of a true email list, forwarders are a good option. You can have multiple forwarders all using the same alias name. For example…
- As you can see, if an email is sent to the admin address, a copy gets sent to John, Jane, Joe, and Jack.
You can also use them on top of real addresses. For example, if you had a real email address, let’s say [email protected] and John had to go out of the office for an extended amount of time. You could setup a forwarder so that any message he gets also gets sent to the person covering his position while he is away. John will still be able to read all the messages sent to him during his time off, but so will the person the forwarder is sending the emails to.
Dos
- You can use them for just about anything where mail needs to be sent to other people/addresses.
- You can use them on top of legitimate email addresses
- You can have one forwarder send to a large number of people
Don’ts
- Something to keep in mind is that if a spam bot gets ahold of the forwarder alias, anyone on the receiving end of the forwarder will get a copy of the spam message. Because of this, be mindful of who you forward emails to. If you have lots of spam messages coming into a forwarder and the person’s email on the receiving end is outside of your server/domain/ip, you risk having your domain, server or IP address blacklisted. This will cause a majority of your legitimate emails to be rejected.
- Don’t create a loop! If you have a forwarder sending back to its self, it will create a loop and the forwarder will not function.
- Depending on your local laws, it may be illegal for you to forward emails from one person to another (including yourself) without them knowing. For example, if you have an employee named John and his email address is [email protected], and you set up a forwarder on top of his address so you get a copy of all his email, and he is not informed of this, it could be a breach of privacy laws.
- Mark forwarded messages from your account as spam. Some email providers such as Yahoo!, Hotmail, Gmail, etc. will see the forwarding email address as the spammer. So, if you have your email account on our servers and a spam message is forwarded to one of your personal email accounts and you then mark it as spam, you are essentially reporting yourself for spamming which could result in a blacklisting.
So now that you know all about why you want to use a forwarder, see the link below for instructions on how to create them.
