The past
Lots of customers get caught out with email forwarding, as the rules around forwarding have changed dramically over the last few years. Once upon a time you could just forward your emails to any other email account and it would arrive.
The present
Nowadays you cannot just forward emails from your website email address across over to another domain that’s on a different service. The reason for this is most email providers now look for forwarded emails and class them as spam. The issue is that you could get a genuine email delivered to info@yourdomain and then it gets forwarded and rejected.
Why does this happen?
It all started with spammers purchasing hosting accounts setting up an email address then setting 100’s of forwarders on the emails account. So, when they had a new spam campaign they only had to send to 1 email address to send to 1000’s of email addresses.
As far as AOL, Gmail, Hotmail and many others forwarded email needs to come from a reliable source, forwarded emails is not that. The problems the hosting company will have is all the emails are being sent through the server so the receiving email company will block the sever IP and your domain.
Here is an alternative way of looking at this?
You go to the airport and a convincing looking person who you have never met before asks you to carry something onto the plane for them and give it to somebody waiting at the airport you are travelling, would you? I didn’t think so.
Sending forwarded emails is exactly that, not as serious in many persons eyes but the likes of Google plus other email mail providers do take a dim view.
Unlike carrying that package onto the plane you could possible be imprisoned. Email companies will ban the server that’s forwarding the emails as a hub for spam, and also put the domain on a blacklist. The truth is you cannot guarantee the content of email being forwarded, just like you couldn’t know the contents of the package you are carrying. So your domain will without a doubt send spam as well as genuine email, hence the lack of delivery.
The future
Ok to really ensure that you get your emails and nothing is being lost, you need to use a mail client and collect the email from your mail server directly, (We offer email accounts with all plans) this ensures that you get every email that’s sent to you. Of course, if it is spam it will be marked as such and in your spam folder or auto deleted as per your preferences. What you cannot afford is missing that important email and the worst thing about this is that you didn’t even know it disappeared.
Forwarders are a great resource and when used correctly is a powerful tool. You can forward emails from one email address to another providing they are all on the same hosting provider or domain.
So you could have several email addresses and only have one mailbox where they all land. With this approach if you like using Gmail they supply an option to collect the emails from the inbox on the server via POP3, doing it this way you will get all the emails and no rejections.
If you ever need advice on the best way for deliverability please get in touch.
