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While email-forwarding can be extremely beneficial to people, there is one catch that beginners should be made aware of, especially if you’re going for one of the shared hosting plans that most of the best web hosts offer. Time and time again during my time with a web hosting company, we found that people were actually spamming themselves and blacklisting their OWN servers due to email forwarding!
Here’s how it works: The big guys — Yahoo!, AOL, Hotmail, Gmail — really, REALLY hate spam, and they’re quick to blacklist any server that they think a spammer is on. If you prefer to use your Yahoo account, for example, but want your customers to email an address that’s @yourdomain.com you might set up a forwarder — your customers see the professional email address, but you can maintain your email as you always have in your Yahoo inbox. Just remember, that ALL your email will be forwarded — including the spam. What often happens is, once the spam hits your Yahoo email, you might mark it as spam. What does Yahoo see? Yahoo sees the spam as being sent from your OWN hosting account — from the server your website is on! Keep on marking that spam, and Yahoo just might blacklist your server. In essence — you’re spamming yourself.
So if you do decide to set up forwarders, always just delete any spam that comes in from your hosting account. Better to be safe that sorry!
