Applies to: All plans (mailboxes included with your hosting).
Before you start: You need to be logged in to your client area at my.maxinodes.com (or to cPanel), the domain must be on your hosting plan, and you need the address you want the mail sent on to.
A forwarder sends every message that arrives at one address on to another address. There are two common uses:
- Forward a mailbox. The mailbox keeps its copy and a second copy goes to the other address, for example while a colleague covers for someone on holiday.
-
Forward an address that has no mailbox. For example, mail to
sales@yourdomain.comcan go straight toanna@yourdomain.com. A forwarder is not a mailbox, so it does not count toward your plan's mailbox limit.
Add a forwarder in your client area
- Log in to your client area at my.maxinodes.com and go to Services -> My Services.
- Click your hosting service, then open Email Forwarders.
- Add a forwarder and enter the address you want to forward: the part before the @, and the domain.
- Choose Forward to Email Address and enter the full address the mail should go to.
- Save the forwarder.
Result: from then on, every message sent to that address also goes to the destination. Send a test message from another account to check.
You can do the same in cPanel under Email -> Forwarders -> Add Forwarder. Both pages also let you forward a whole domain to another domain (mail to any address at the first domain goes to the same address at the second) and remove a forwarder you no longer need.
Forwarding to Gmail, Outlook.com or another provider
You can forward to an address at another provider, but keep two things in mind:
- The receiving provider may treat forwarded mail as spam. A forwarded message still carries the original sender's address but arrives from our servers, so the receiving provider's checks on the sender can fail. Some forwarded messages may then land in Junk at the other end, or be refused.
- Forwarded mail counts toward your sending limit. Each forwarded message is sent out from your domain and counts toward its hourly sending limit, just like mail you send yourself. An address that receives a lot of mail can use the limit up. See Email limits by plan.
If you simply want to read the mail in another app, adding the mailbox to that app with IMAP is usually more reliable than forwarding: see Mail app settings. Forwarding to another mailbox on your own domain is delivered on our server, so the first point does not apply.
Automatic replies (autoresponders)
An autoresponder sends an automatic reply to incoming messages, for example while you are away. Set one up on the same service page under Autoresponders, or in cPanel under Email -> Autoresponders: choose the address, write the subject and the message, and set when it starts and stops.
- Set the Interval to more than zero hours, so each sender gets one reply in that period rather than one for every message.
- Automatic replies are sent from your domain and count toward its hourly sending limit, like forwarded mail.
- If the address has no mailbox and no forwarder, incoming messages are deleted once the reply has gone out. To keep them, use the autoresponder on an address that has a mailbox or a forwarder.
Email Forwarders or domain email forwarding?
There are two different kinds of forwarding at Maxinodes:
- Email Forwarders (this article) are part of your hosting plan and work alongside your mailboxes, for any domain on the plan.
- Domain email forwarding is part of a domain registered with us and is set up under Domains -> My Domains. It is meant for a domain without hosting or mailboxes: see How to set up email forwarding on a domain.
Use one or the other for a domain, not both. When a domain's mail is handled by the mailboxes on your hosting plan, its mail (MX) records point at our mail server, so domain email forwarding never sees the mail: use Email Forwarders instead.
Troubleshooting this task
- Forwarded mail is not arriving: check the destination address for typos, then look in the Junk or Spam folder at the destination. In cPanel, Email -> Track Delivery shows what happened to a message, including what the receiving server answered.
- Forwarded mail arrives late or bounces at busy times: the domain may have reached its hourly sending limit. See Email limits by plan.
- Mail to an address without a mailbox bounces: check that the forwarder exists for exactly that address and domain.
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