How To Create An Email Forward Inside cPanel
Creating email forwarders is a great way to have additional email addresses @yourdomain that you don't want to set up separate mailboxes for. Example: If you have your primary email address and you have an employee but you want 'both' addresses to receive sales@ in their inboxes, the forwarder option is for you! After you add one forwarder, just duplicate it to go to the other mailbox! It's not uncommon for organizations to have many forwarders going to groups of employees!
Please note: It is NOT recommended to forward your email to a @gmail or @yahoo or @outlook address or any other external email address. These mail providers have increased security and because of the ever increasing amount of spam being sent on the internet, can and will reject email 'without' you even knowing about it. It just won't show up! Forwarders work best for local mailboxes!
Please see this help tutorial for how to 'reliably' get your email into your Gmail account!
STEP 1: Login to cPanel -> Forwards:
STEP 2: If you have multiple domains, choose your domain from the drop down. Then click on Add Forwarder!
STEP 3: Enter in the address, make sure the domain is correct and then put in the destination email and click Add Forwarder.
Reminder, it is NOT recommended to forward to external email accounts such as Gmail/Yahoo/Outlook!
The Advanced Options, mostly never used, but you can expand that for additional options of what to do with the new mail forwarder you setup.
You can also set specific email addresses to fail (Discard and send an error to sender) which is beneficial when terminating an existing account (i.e. employee leaves company).
Finally, there are some advanced options when forwarding email:
Forward to a system account - cPanel creates a default, or system mail account, which can act as a "catch all." You can send email here, putting it into one centralized mailbox.
Pipe to a Program - Some software applications allow email to be forwarded and be treated like a web form submission. This is common in applications such as WHMCS which use this feature to create helpdesk tickets where people can simply send their request to an email address vs. logging in and filling out a form.
Discard - As noted in the screenshot above, you can use a forward to discard email, but it's not recommended as the sender doesn't know the email is simply deleted. A better option would be choosing the option to send the sender an error message.
STEP 4: Once your forwarder is added you will see it in the list below!
Add Domain Forward - In addition to forwarding individual mail accounts, you can forward all email from one domain to another:
This might be used if you have recently added a new domain and want all mail for this new domain to go to the second domain. It is useful for 'local' mailbox delivery. Forwarding any email 'externally' can be 'unreliable' for mission critical emails!
Please note: It is NOT recommended to forward your email to a @gmail or @yahoo or @outlook address or any other external email address. These mail providers have increased security and because of the ever increasing amount of spam being sent on the internet, can and will reject email 'without' you even knowing about it. It just won't show up! Forwarders work best for local mailboxes!
Attention Gmail users!
Please see this help tutorial for how to 'reliably' get your email into your Gmail account!
STEP 1: Login to cPanel -> Forwards:
STEP 2: If you have multiple domains, choose your domain from the drop down. Then click on Add Forwarder!
STEP 3: Enter in the address, make sure the domain is correct and then put in the destination email and click Add Forwarder.
Reminder, it is NOT recommended to forward to external email accounts such as Gmail/Yahoo/Outlook!
The Advanced Options, mostly never used, but you can expand that for additional options of what to do with the new mail forwarder you setup.
You can also set specific email addresses to fail (Discard and send an error to sender) which is beneficial when terminating an existing account (i.e. employee leaves company).
Finally, there are some advanced options when forwarding email:
Forward to a system account - cPanel creates a default, or system mail account, which can act as a "catch all." You can send email here, putting it into one centralized mailbox.
Pipe to a Program - Some software applications allow email to be forwarded and be treated like a web form submission. This is common in applications such as WHMCS which use this feature to create helpdesk tickets where people can simply send their request to an email address vs. logging in and filling out a form.
Discard - As noted in the screenshot above, you can use a forward to discard email, but it's not recommended as the sender doesn't know the email is simply deleted. A better option would be choosing the option to send the sender an error message.
STEP 4: Once your forwarder is added you will see it in the list below!
Add Domain Forward - In addition to forwarding individual mail accounts, you can forward all email from one domain to another:
This might be used if you have recently added a new domain and want all mail for this new domain to go to the second domain. It is useful for 'local' mailbox delivery. Forwarding any email 'externally' can be 'unreliable' for mission critical emails!
Updated on: 08/04/2025
Thank you!