Applies to:
Professional Hosting
Universal Hosting
Reseller Hosting
WordPress Hosting
Difficulty:
Easy
Time Needed:
5 minutes
Introduction
We do not offer email redirection to external mailboxes. As detailed below, doing so can result in loss of emails. There are other options and we also link to details on these for popular email services.
Please note: For help on how to set up email mailboxes, please read ‘How to manage your email addresses’.
Why shouldn’t I forward emails to an external provider?
There are a number of reasons email redirection is a poor email delivery technique. As ISPs around the globe step up their efforts to combat spam, email direction is frequently caught in the crossfire. The injured party is you, your domain and your email.
Blacklisting
When we forward your email to a third party such as Gmail, we forward ALL your email. This means every piece of genuine email, and every piece of spam email. For their part, Gmail sees your mailbox here at 34SP.com as the source of that spam, and begins to mark your 34SP.com email server as a spam sender. This in turn eventually leads to the blacklisting of your server. Blacklisting means the immediate loss of your email service. We work with blacklists as this happens to de-list servers but the process can be slow and time consuming, and in the meantime you lose email.
SPF
Sender Policy Framework is an anti spam technique many ISPs use to authenticate the sending server and ensure it is who it claims to be. The technical requirements of email redirection need one server to impersonate another. Because of this impersonation method used by the redirection system, SPF blocks the email redirection as a spam server. Again, the result is you lose email.
What can I do instead?
Firstly, you should create your mailbox here at 34SP.com as a full mailbox. These can be accessed directly with POP or IMAP as standard, through a computer, phone or tablet. If your mail provider supports it, an alternative is to use their MX records instead (this means mail is delivered straight to them).
We understand that many users have a lot of mailboxes, and a lot of different email logins. We also understand that users want to consolidate email logins because of this – which is why email redirection is so popular.
If you’re aiming to reduce the number of logins you make to check your email there are still best practice approaches that avoid redirection. Most popular free email services, for example, let you use their tools to pull your email from our servers to theirs.
By avoiding forwarding, you can stop worrying about SPF and blacklisting – and you don’t lose email.