Are you forwarding your incoming received emails from your domain’s hosting control panel to an external email provider like Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook etc. or any other provider like your ISP’s account? You might even don’t know that you might be blocking your important email by creating email forwarding! Email forwarding is a very bad practice for any domain and even for any business! So, don’t block your email by making the mistake of creating email forwarding to external email accounts.
What appears to be a harmless function that allows you the convenience of consolidating your email accounts, may actually be causing you harm in ways you don’t see or know about. In this article, we will explain a few reasons why you should not forward your email and what you can do differently so that your email doesn’t block at external email services like Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook etc.
Using the email forwarding option from your domain or hosting control panel will significantly increase the chances that your domain’s email will be seen as spam and will arrive in the junk box, or worse yet, server level spam filters can just eliminate the message without your or the sender’s knowledge.
Even it can result in your domain and server getting blacklisted, which ultimately means you won’t receive or possibly send any email at all.
Why
When forwarding email from your domain to another service, such as Gmail, all the email received by your address is forwarded on, regardless of the content. If Gmail scans the content and decides it’s spam, it will take a look at the server that sent it. If enough is flagged from that source, which is now your domain’s server (not the server which actually sends you that email which your created email forwarding sends to Gmail), Gmail may consider your domain to be a spammer. This can result in all email from your domain or your hosted server being blocked. In worst case scenario ultimately your domain will be blacklisted in different spam URL website and your email sending server IP at RBL. This means all of your sent emails, and all the email accounts under your domain or even from other customers who are using that server will be rejected by almost all the email servers.
Spam filters are learning filters. They learn based on the actions of the email recipient. If you have your mail forwarded to Gmail and receive spam and mark it as spam, what you can be doing is marking your own server as spam.
When the external server rejects email, it may cause the forwarding server to queue the email to resend later. In the end, the mail will ‘bounce’, creating the possibility that more reputation and delivery problems may arise.
There is also an issue with Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and Domain Keys (DKIM). These records specify the legitimate servers that may send email on behalf of a domain. Your servers will not likely be a permitted server, and so some legitimate emails may be blocked as a result.
All of these issues combined can also further damage your mail sending reputation and lead to deeper issues, such as your server, and your external service, getting onto a blacklist.
Options
The best thing to do if you have multiple email accounts and want them easily checked is to setup an email client, like Outlook or Thunderbird. There are many others as well. Some webmail programs, like Gmail allow you to setup your external POP3/IMAP account in a way that allows Gmail to check your XeonBD’s account. This eliminates the need to forward and allows you to get all your mail in one spot. You can learn more about this matter at Gmail’s help center by clicking here.
On the other hand, you can enable SpamExperts incoming email filtering add-on on your domain thus every incoming email will be scanned by SpamExperts email filtering and spam emails will never able to enter into your inbox and while your created filter will be going to forward any email to your external email address SpamExperts outgoing email filtering will check your email prior to sending and if anyhow any spam email wasn’t properly blocked by the incoming filter the outgoing filter will block it instantly to being forwarded.
You can learn more about how to configure SpamExperts by clicking here.
