Why we do not recommend email forwarding
cPanel offers Email Forwarding as a part of their software. Because of this, we have historically allowed the function to be utilised by our clients as a way to forward email either internally or externally.
As time has progressed and technology has improved, there have been a number of changes to the way we use Email Systems and as such, some issues that were not foreseen when allowing mail forwarding initially have now been introduced.
Two reasons not to forward email
1. Server reputation damage
If someone sends you a spam message to user@example.com and that email is then forwarded to user@gmail.com when that email is forwarded to Google, they see us as the sender and therefore marks our server reputation down and your domain name down.
- This means that users of the same server will then have less chance of landing in the Inbox of Gmail users overall, whether sending a direct email or forwarding.
- This same logic also applies to the other large providers - Outlook, AOL, BT and so on.
2. No email tracking
If an email is bounced back for any reason, it would not go back to the forwarder address as this would end up in a loop attempting to deliver back to the destination address, bouncing, and then back to the forwarder address. Because of this, the message is silently discarded. The original sender of the message may see a bounceback, although, as most of these messages come from automated systems, i.e newsletters or ticket systems, the chance of a Human actually seeing the bounceback is very low to none at all.
MailChannels
We recently implemented the MailChannels platform to filter our outgoing emails. This provides a number of benefits to users, most notably though, the ability to avoid blacklists by relaying our emails through their large pool of sending IP addresses. You can read more about MailChannels by clicking here.
The introduction of MailChannels highlighted yet another reason that email forwarding cannot be seen as reliable due to the way they classify emails.
MailChannels applies reputation-based rules on the sender_id of the message, which in a normal email transaction, would be the email address sending the message - i.e user@example.com.
So, if you send an email from user@example.com to user@hotmail.com and then the Hotmail user marks this message as Spam, restrictions will be placed on user@example.com - stopping them from sending to any other addresses temporarily - this is expected behaviour, spammers get penalised.
When forwarded emails are sent through the MailChannels system, the IP of the originating sender is listed in the sender_id field, rather than the email address.
Therefore, if you are using a service such as Mandrill, MailChimp or any other bulk email provider and these services are sending messages to a forwarder address, when these are forwarded on, MailChannels will see the Mandrill/MailChimp etc IP address, rather than the email address.
This means that if someone uses the Mandrill/MailChimp provider to send a spam message, their originating server IP will become temporarily blocked for everyone who is forwarding messages on from that service.
This means that emails sent via Mandrill, MailChimp or other newsletter providers may be blocked if a 3rd party user reports these messages as spam.
