Email forwarders: My emails are not forwarding

In this article, we’ll go over the cons of using email forwarders, the problems with email forwarders & why we DO NOT recommend using them.

Quick Points:

• You need to have an actual mailbox present on the hosting account.
• To avoid spam from being forwarded, our servers reject all incoming mail without a valid mailbox.
• You can also use IMAP or POP to fetch your email into external service providers.

There must be an actual mailbox present on the hosting account. You cannot simply create a forwarder with no mailbox as our servers will discard ALL mail that does not have a valid mailbox.

cPanel has a not-so-great feature for forwarding emails called “Email Forwarders”. While email forwarders may sound like an easy option to send your emails from our servers to an external provider, there are some issues with using these.

The biggest issue we see with email forwarders is with incoming SPAM. When you have a forwarder set to forward all mail to a specific email address on our servers, it will attempt to forward ALL incoming mail back out. If there is SPAM coming it, the forwarder will try sending it out using the forwarder, as expected. This SPAM will then get blocked by our SPAM filters.

Another problem is that sometimes the end receiving email (such as Gmail, Yahoo, etc) can treat forwarded email as SPAM, whether it is actually SPAM or not. This can be problematic because the message being forwarded might get put into the junk/SPAM folder at the final email provider. (Gmail, Yahoo, etc) This then prompts you or whoever the email was being forwarded to, to think the email was not sent.

While cPanel includes email forwarding options built-in, we do not have a way to disable it. Because of the problems associated with email forwarders, we do not officially support the use of these types of email options. You should ALWAYS be checking the server for your mail. If your mail is important, DO NOT rely on a 3rd party email and most certainly not email forwarders.

Most 3rd party email providers such as Gmail have the option to fetch emails using IMAP or POP. We highly suggest you use these options, as the forwarded emails might get sent to the junk/SPAM box prompting you to think our servers did not send the messages. If they are in fact SPAM, we won’t allow them to leave our servers anyway in order to protect against outgoing SPAM.

Alternatively, if you do not plan to use our servers to check mail, you should use MX records to direct your emails off-site.

Our Guiding Principles

• Provide consistent, stable, and reliable web hosting services.
• Ensure rapid ticket response and quick resolutions to issues.
• Never saturate or over-provision servers to ensure stability and speed for our customers.
• Use only high-quality enterprise-class hardware to ensure minimal downtime from hardware failures.
• Provide clear pricing with no hidden fees or gotchas.