Everything You Need to Know about How to Forward Emails

Rather than bouncing around trying to check each email throughout the day, you can forward those emails to one central location, so it’s easier to manage it all. Here, we’ll take a look at how to forward emails to another email account, as well as the pros and cons that come along with it.

• Why would I want to forward my emails? Like we covered, someone with multiple email addresses can more easily manage everything by forwarding all their mail to a central location. For instance, if you’re transitioning from an email address you had as a teenager and then want to make a more professional one, you can forward emails from your old address to your new one without missing out on promotional deals from your favorite brands or messages from old friends.
  

  

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  Run a small business? It’s not a bad idea to have multiple email addresses for different occasions. You might run a promotion and create a special email address that makes it easy to separate messages related to your promotion from everyday correspondence. However, checking that special email account isn’t a habit, so messages might fall through the cracks. Forwarding your emails to your main account ensures you see every message without putting in the extra effort.

• Is there a reason not to forward email? As with most things, there are some cons to going this route. Automatically forwarding emails creates a duplicate of every message you receive in your mailbox, which means, in some instances, there’s one more copy of an email containing sensitive information. If everyone who emailed you encrypted their emails containing personal information, this wouldn’t be a problem. But this isn’t always the case. A copy of an unencrypted email in your secondary mailbox creates one more place a hacker can steal information. The same goes for spam emails. A message with a malicious link or attachment will be in more than one place and increase the likelihood of a breach.
• Can someone see when you forward their email? In short, no, someone can’t see you’ve forwarded their email. The only exception to this would be if you manually forward their message and include them as one of the recipients.
• How do I automatically forward emails? Every email client’s exact steps will be different, but the concept is universal. First, you’ll want to go into your email settings and search for an option to set up automated email forwarding. Simply enter the new email address where you’d like to have emails forwarded. You can also create additional filters so not every message is forwarded to the new destination.

As an alternative to setting up automatic forwarding, you can use a similar feature in POP or IMAP retrieval. POP and IMAP are more involved in their set up but create a different retrieval method as you manually “ask” the server to retrieve emails. The POP and IMAP method allows you to bulk messages in a single retrieval rather than having messages intermingled in your inbox. Your email client will have specific instructions that will walk you through the process of setting up POP/IMAP.

Now you know how to forward emails to another email address and why you should (or shouldn’t) set up automated forwarding—making it much easier to manage multiple email addresses all in one place. Learn more about topics like how to manage spam, send emails as texts, when to use encryption, and more.