1. Home
  2. Email
  3. How to Setup Autoresponders and Forwarders

How to Setup Autoresponders and Forwarders

An ‘autoresponder’ will send a response back to anybody who emails that specific address. This feature is often used as an ‘out of office’ reply, or more creatively to for example send out automated sales information.

If you still want to receive a copy of the incoming email in addition to sending the automated response, be sure to use an email address which is already configured as an ’email account’ or ‘Forwarder’ within your cPanel.

If you simply want to send an automated reply without ever reading what has been sent to this address, use an email address which is not configured as one of your existing email accounts or Forwarders. Do bear in mind that doing so means you’ll never see any email that was sent to this address.

Note:

Setting up an autoresponder for a short time frame such as being away on vacation is fine. You should avoid having a permanent autoresponder such as a ‘thank you for signing up’ responder as these can lead to providers blocking your email.

Email Forwarders

Email forwarding is a feature that forwards email sent to a specific address on your domain through to any other email address.

Note:

Forwarding emails may seem convenient however it’s considered poor practice. You should never set a permanent email forwarder because you’re not only forwarding legitimate emails but spam emails are also forwarded to your destination.

Let’s take Hotmail as an example. If you forward all of your email to Hotmail then that means Hotmail will also receive all of the spam that comes to your domains email address. At some point Hotmail will block your domain or blacklist the servers IP address for abuse. The correct way to use Hotmail or Gmail is to setup your email account as an IMAP or POP account with them. It’s free and it allows you to use Hotmail or Gmail as your email client.

A common use of email forwarding comes when a business requires copies of incoming sales email be sent to all of their sales staff.

To forward incoming email through to any other email address, click the “Forwarders” icon within your cPanel. From this screen, click “Add Forwarder” and add a) the address you’d like to forward mail for, and b) the address the email is to go to.

Note:

If you set up forwarding for a specific email address which also has an email account setup in cPanel, any incoming email for that address will be forwarded and stored in the mailbox. If you don’t want to keep a copy of your forwarded mail on our servers, simply delete the corresponding mailbox (under the “Email Accounts” icon in your cPanel), but leave the forwarder in place. A forwarder does not need a corresponding POP mailbox on our servers to function.

Updated on September 26, 2019

Was this article helpful?

Related Articles