Knowledgebase

A forwarder is important when you want a copy of an email to be sent to another e-mail address upon receipt. To create an e-mail forwarder, do the following:

1. Log into cPanel
2. Click on the "Forwarders" icon.
3. Click on "Add Forwarder."
4. In the first box, provide the beginning extension for the email address you wish to set up to froward email from.
5. In the drop down menu to the right of the “@” sign, select a domain for which the email address is associated with.
6. Next, you must choose the destination of the new forwarding email. You will be given three options.
   • "Forward to an email address" is the default option. Select this if you wish to send emails to a specific email address.
   • Discard with error to sender (at SMTP time). Choose this option if you wish for the E-mails to bounce back to the sender with an error message. You may choose the failure message that is given.
   • The "Pipe to a program" option will send the email to a script of your choice. When piping to a program, you should enter a path relative to your home directory. If the script requires an interpreter such as perl or php, you should omit the "/usr/bin/perl" or "/usr/bin/php" portion. Make sure that your script is executable and has the appropriate Hashbang at the top of the script. If you do not know how to add the Hashbang, just make sure to name your script file with the correct extension and you will be prompted to have the Hashbang added automatically.
7. Now click on "Add Forwarder" to complete the creation of your new forwarder.

You have now just created a forwarder. When someone sends you and email to the email address specified a copy will also be sent to the email address provided. Please be aware, It will leave a copy of the email on the sever as well. This means that eventually, the email box will fill and will stop forwarding messages.

To avoid this issue, you can create a forwarder for an email box that currently does not exist. If you do this, there will be no email box for a copy of the message to be saved in before the message is forwarded off of the server.