Setting Up Email Forwarders Print

What a forwarder does

An email forwarder automatically sends mail from one address on to another. Mail arrives at the first address and is passed straight on to wherever you point it, without you having to check the first address at all. It is one of the most useful and underused email features, and it takes about a minute to set up.

A quick example: you want info@yourbusiness.tld and sales@yourbusiness.tld to both land in your main inbox, without setting up and checking two more mailboxes. Forwarders do exactly that, both addresses forward to your one real mailbox, and you work from a single place.

Where to set one up

1. Log in to cPanel at yourdomain.tld/cpanel and open Forwarders, findable via the search box, as our cPanel tour describes.
2. Click Add Forwarder.
3. Enter the address to forward from, the part before the @, and choose the domain if you have more than one.
4. Enter the destination address to forward to, which can be a mailbox on your own domain or an external address like a Gmail or Outlook account.
5. Click Add Forwarder, and it works immediately.

That is the whole task. Mail sent to the from-address now arrives at the destination automatically.

What forwarders are great for

• Role addresses into one inbox. info@, sales@, accounts@, and support@ can all forward to a single mailbox you actually check, so you present a professional set of addresses without juggling several inboxes.
• Catching mail at a new address during a change, so nothing sent to an old address is missed while people update their records.
• Sending a copy to more than one person. A single address can forward to several destinations, so mail to sales@ reaches your whole sales team at once.
• A professional address that lands in a personal inbox, forwarding you@yourbusiness.tld to a Gmail account you already live in, if you would rather not run a separate mailbox at all.

Forwarder or mailbox? Know which you want

A forwarder is not a mailbox, and the difference matters. A forwarder only passes mail on, it stores nothing and it cannot send mail from that address. A mailbox actually holds mail and lets you send from the address. Which you want depends on whether the address needs to send and store, or merely receive and pass on, and our article on choosing between a mailbox and a forwarder works through that decision in full. For now, the short version: if you only need mail to an address to reach you somewhere else, a forwarder is the lighter, simpler choice.

A note on sending from a forwarded address

This is the one thing that catches people out. If you forward sales@yourbusiness.tld to your personal inbox and then reply, your reply goes out from your personal address, not from sales@, because a forwarder cannot send. If you need to reply as the forwarded address, you need either a real mailbox for it, or to configure your mail program to send as that address, which is a separate setup. If replying from the professional address matters, a mailbox is usually the cleaner answer, as our mailbox-versus-forwarder article explains.

Good to know

Forwarders are free, instant, and do not count against your mailbox storage, since they store nothing, which makes them an easy way to look professional without adding inboxes to manage. A sensible common setup is one real mailbox for yourself, with info@, sales@, and the rest forwarding into it, tidy, cheap, and simple. And if you later find you need one of those addresses to send as well as receive, converting it to a full mailbox is straightforward, our article on managing email accounts in cPanel covers creating one.