When to use Email Forwarding

Within the HostAway Members Panel you can add an Email Forward to any of your mailboxes. This will route incoming messages for that particular mailbox to a different address.

You can also choose to keep a copy of forwarded mail which will deliver the email into your mailbox in addition to forwarding the email to a different address.

Email forwarding can be useful when aggregating messages from various mailboxes into a single local account. E.g. having accounts@bobselectrical.com.au and info@bobselectrical.com.au forward to bob@bobselectrical.com.au.

Many of our customers used to forward their mailboxes to an external address (such as Gmail, Hotmail or a Telstra/Optus/iiNet address). E.g. having bob@bobselectrical.com.au forward to bobselectrical@gmail.com. Over the past few years this has become a major problem and no longer works effectively.

Why? Forwarding all messages means that any SPAM sent to bob@bobselectrical.com.au gets sent to bobselectrical@gmail.com along with the legitimate messages.

Email forwarding to an external address makes it appear to the recipient server (@gmail.com) that your domain is the source of the SPAM messages instead of the original sender. Forwarding the SPAM messages harms your email reputation, as you will be marked as the source of the SPAM, making your future messages more likely to be marked SPAM or rejected entirely.

But it’s always worked in the past! Sorry, that’s no reason for it to continue working. Google and Microsoft are large enough to change the rules and decide what emails they choose to reject.

So what can you do?

Instead of setting up an Email forward, most major email providers include a way to connect an existing mail account to fetch the contents of the account’s Inbox. You can create a POP3 connection to the HostAway server from the remote mail provider, in order to download the email messages.

To continue the example above, Bob could add bob@bobselectrical.com.au into his Gmail account so that he’s able to check the mailbox from within Gmail itself.

Although HostAway still provide the Email forwarding feature (for now), we recommend you do not forward emails to external addresses due to the high rate of delivery failures and ongoing issues. Instead just check the mailbox directly.

If you have any questions about your email forwarding configuration please don’t hesitate to contact us.