At DataPacket, we strive to offer reliable and standards-compliant email services. One topic that often causes issues for customers is email forwarding—specifically, forwarding messages from one domain or mailbox to another external address such as Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook. While this may seem convenient, forwarding email is increasingly incompatible with modern email standards and is no longer recommended.
The Problem with Email Forwarding
Forwarding email disrupts key authentication mechanisms that were designed to protect against spam and spoofing. Technologies like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC allow domain owners to specify which servers are authorized to send mail on their behalf. When you forward an email, your server becomes the one delivering the message, even though it wasn’t the original sender. This causes most receiving servers to see a mismatch and either reject, quarantine, or mark the message as spam.
Another issue is spam forwarding. When a spam message is received by your server and then forwarded, your server becomes the source of that spam from the perspective of the destination provider. Over time, this can damage your domain’s reputation, result in IP blacklisting, and affect mail delivery for all users on your hosting plan.
There is a system called SRS (Sender Rewriting Scheme) that attempts to resolve some of these forwarding issues by rewriting the sender address so it appears to come from your domain instead of the original sender. While this helps mail pass SPF checks, many spam filters and providers still penalize SRS-rewritten messages. In practice, this makes SRS an unreliable and inconsistent solution, especially for high-volume or mission-critical email.
Recommended Alternatives
Instead of forwarding mail, we encourage you to access your email directly using Webmail or an email client configured with IMAP. Services like Gmail also offer built-in POP3 retrieval, which allows Gmail to fetch mail from your hosted mailbox without breaking sender authentication.
Although forwarding may have been acceptable in the past, changes in global email policy and filtering behavior make it a poor choice today. Even with workarounds like SRS, forwarded messages are often flagged, delayed, or blocked. For a more reliable and standards-compliant email experience, direct access or mail fetching should be used instead.
