Automatic Forwarding with cPanel: When, Why and How?
What is Automatic Forwarding?
Let’s say Neil at Neil’s Machining is currently using yahoo mail. His current email address at yahoo is neilsmachining@yahoo.com. But he wants something a bit more professional, maybe something that matches his domain name? So he decides that his email address is going to be neil@neilsmachining.com. What’s the fastest and easiest way to let Neil receive email at neil@neilsmachining.com? In cPanel, add a forwarder from neil@neilsmachining.com to neilsmachinin@yahoo.com. That works, right? Yes, but what are the risks associated with automatic forwarding? It’s possible that Yahoo may send these forwarded messages to the spam folder, block our messages or blacklist our server if someone sends Neil spam that gets forwarded.
What is a Spam Filter? Mail Server Reputation?
A spam filter is a type of filter that constantly learns from the mail being sent to its users and each user’s actions. When an incoming mail server rejects an e-mail, it’ll cause the server to queue and the e-mail to resend later. It’ll eventually cause the mail to ‘bounce’ and more delivery problems may arise and more severely emails altogether may be blocked as a result.
Some mail providers have a reputation system that keeps track of the messages that are coming in from each outgoing mail server. It’s often very difficult to tell what your reputation is with the major email providers, because they don’t exactly make that information readily available; so sometimes it’s difficult to know where you stand and whether your messages are getting through or not. This is why we recommend a ‘play it safe’ approach to managing an outgoing mail server and try to use automatic forwarding as little as possible.
Potential Risks of Forwarding E-mail:
When forwarding e-mail to your yahoo account as said above, everything gets forwarded, including actual spam. This can confuse yahoo’s spam filter - yahoo can potentially scan the forwarded emails and consider your server to be responsible for the spam. This can result in all of the mail sent from your server being blocked.
When to use Automatic Forwarding vs. When to check your email directly
We recommend using automatic forwarding only to email accounts that are hosted on the same server (for example: from sales@acmewidgets.com to steve@acmewidgets.com). See the steps below if this applies to you.
We do not recommend automatic forwarding to remote hosts such as gmail and yahoo (for example: from sales@acmewidgets.com to acmewidgets@yahoo.com) because of the risks of spam penalties - Instead, we recommend adding your email account to the device of your choice with a native mail app, which will allow you to check your mailbox directly using IMAP - see Why You should check your email directly using IMAP instead of automatic forwarding: Directly using IMAP instead of automatic forwarding
Please contact us for support if you need help accessing your email on your device. We have compiled a list of instructions for popular devices and native email software. If your device/software is on the list, you may be able to set it up yourself:
See instructions: How to access your email using various apps:
How to access your email using various apps:How to add a cPanel email forwarder?
- Log into cPanel cPanel login
- Click Mail > Forwarders
- On the forwarders page, click Add Forwarder
- Input the information needed for the forwarder: email address/username then select the appropriate domain from the drop-down menu.
- Type the email address that you want to forward the email to.
- Click ‘Add Forwarder’
You should see your newly added Forwarder and the message “All email sent to neilsmachining@email.com will now be copied to you@email.com”.