E-mail forwarding is a mechanism that will receive an e-mail destined for a particular user in a domain and route it on to another user in a different domain.

Suppose, for example, you (Joe) have a domain called my-domain.com hosted by HCI Data Ltd. . You already have an e-mail address, say joe24867@free-isp.net as you use free-isp to access the Internet.

In order to look professional, as if you had your own web server hosting my-domain.com, you would tell people to e-mail you at joe@my-domain.com When the e-mail is sent to Joe@my-domain.com it will arrive at the HCI mail server. Normally it would post the e-mail into a POP3 mailbox called Joe for the domain my-domain.com. But you have decided that the cost of a POP3 mailbox cannot be justified. In this case we will set up a mechanism that will take the e-mail to Joe@my-domain.com and send it on to joe24867@free-isp.net which you can collect like any other e-mail sent directly to joe24867@free-isp.net.

If the Internet is working, the extra time to forward the e-mail will typically be less than 5 seconds.

However, there is more likelihood that forwarded e-mails will be blocked by your ISP or placed in your spam folder. This is due to spam filters looking at who sent the e-mail and if the e-mail came from a know server for that sender. From your ISP's perspective, the e-mail comes from a HCI Data Ltd server. You ISP may deem that the sender is not permitted to send e-mail from an HCI Data Ltd server and will mark the e-mail as spam. It is for this reason that you should regularly check your spam mail box for legitimate e-mails that are not spam at all!