Glossary Entry
What is Email Forwarder?
Email Forwarder without the jargon — the definition, the analogy, and why any site owner should care.
The short answer
An email forwarder relays mail from one address to another, putting role addresses into real mailboxes with no extra password issued.
What follows: the longer explanation, a picture that holds, the practical stakes, and the places you will genuinely meet it.
By the Hosting & Domains team · Reviewed 18 August 2026
100+
Terms in the jargon buster
2 min
Average read time
Plain
English throughout
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People, if you get stuck
Addresses such as info@ and sales@, along with any you have retired, land in the inboxes of whoever answers them. The forwarding address stores nothing itself unless you give it a mailbox too. When duties change hands, you edit one line.
Two rough edges are worth knowing. Send forwarded mail to an outside provider and their spam filtering can take against it, since the message arrives with an odd trail behind it. And two addresses pointed at each other will bounce round in circles until somebody steps in.
A way to picture Email Forwarder
A change-of-address card lodged at the sorting office. Post addressed to whoever left still finds the person doing the job today, and the card is rewritten when the desk changes hands next.
Any analogy flattens the detail, naturally — but this one is solid enough to think with, and thinking is what a jargon buster is for.
Why it matters to a site owner
A team of three looks organised because of forwarders. Every role address is covered, nobody juggles extra logins, and passing a duty to somebody else is one edit rather than an announcement.
That, incidentally, is the bar for any technical term — not 'could I lecture on it' but 'would I recognise it as the answer to my problem'. For this one, you now would.
Email Forwarder out in the open
billing@ forwards to the bookkeeper. A new accountant arrives and one edit redirects years of supplier habit, with no supplier needing to be told.
Entirely unremarkable once you have seen it — which is the point: most hosting ideas are plain machinery behind an intimidating label.
How Hosting & Domains deals with it
Here it largely looks after itself, since the defaults are sensible and the panel puts the controls within reach the moment you want them. Read on: Autoresponder, Catch-All Email, Webmail and IMAP.
The rate you register at is the rate you renew at, so year two costs precisely what year one did — nothing lying in wait on the invoice.
Unexplained jargon slows everybody down
An unexplained piece of jargon is, to us, a service defect. This is the support team's collected translations, published where a search engine can hand them over on our behalf.
Order an annual plan and the first year of the name's registration is on us.
- 100+ entries, plain English all the way
- Ordinary analogies, working examples
- Neighbouring ideas linked together
- Written by our own support engineers
Why Hosting & Domains
Standard on every plan
Tied to real hosting
Examples name platforms you would genuinely use, never an abstract diagram on a whiteboard.
Stakes made explicit
More than what a thing is: the moments it turns out to be the answer to a problem you have.
Jargon-free by design
Definitions written for people who run sites, not for other sysadmins — translation rather than restatement.
This term, properly landed
Email Forwarder defined, pictured by analogy and located in your own panel — recognise-level after a single read.
Cross-wired entries
Related terms point at each other, so one lookup compounds into working knowledge.
Analogies that hold
Every concept comes with a mental model that returns exactly when you need it.
Quick Start
Order placed to site online
- 1
Find it in your own account
Nothing teaches a hosting term faster than finding it in your own panel; five minutes of looking beats an hour of reading.
- 2
Check the defaults as they stand
Look at how your account has it configured. Nine times in ten the default is right, and a check turns the guess into certainty.
- 3
Chase the neighbouring terms
Hosting terms travel in groups — Autoresponder, Catch-All Email and Webmail finish this one's picture, each a two-minute read away.
Built In
Fitted to every plan
- Spam and virus screening on every mailbox by default
- Softaculous included for one-click application installs
- Upgrades applied in place, with no migration when you change plan
- Free SSL on every plan, reissued before the old one lapses
- Webmail in the browser plus IMAP, POP and SMTP for any client
- A renewal figure identical to the one you registered at
- WordPress Toolkit, with the updates seen to for you
- Your existing site brought across by our engineers, at no charge
- DDoS filtering absorbed at the network edge
- WebP image optimisation built in, at no extra charge
Frequently Asked
The questions that come up most
For info@, a forwarder or a real mailbox?
A forwarder where it is simply a route to somebody who will answer from their own address. Give it a real mailbox once the address needs its own history and needs to reply under its own name. As a rule, roles get routed and people get a box.
Why does forwarded mail sometimes disappear?
The destination's filtering, most often. A forward pushes the original sender through your server, and some providers read that shape as suspicious. Whitelisting the route fixes it, or you replace the forward with a mailbox the other end collects from.
Will the renewal cost more than the first term?
No. The rate you order at is the rate you renew at, year after year. There is no introductory teaser here, so no second-year jump is waiting — the hosting line stays a fixed figure your accounts can plan around.
Can I choose the PHP version myself?
Yes — PHP is set per site from the control panel, so a legacy application and a current one can run side by side in one account. Extensions and per-site tuning are on the same screen, and none of it goes near a support ticket.
Keep reading
Webmail
Webmail is your mailbox inside a browser: nothing to set up, only a login that reaches the same server-side…
Autoresponder
An autoresponder replies to anybody who writes to an address automatically, covering holiday notices and in…
How to Create an Email Forwarder
The way it is really done, in order, with the usual mistake pointed out.
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