Do you have a primary email address and you’re thinking of setting up another one for work? Which do you think will be more appropriate? A regular or a forwarding email address. Well, let’s find out what each of them can do to help your decision.
What Is a Regular Email Address?
A regular email address has unique inboxes that allow you to access, receive, and send emails. You can reach your inbox online, or through an email client.
An email address like name@example.com consists of the local-part and a domain or separated by the symbol @. In some cases, the domain part can be replaced with an IP address enclosed in brackets.
To use an illustration, let’s create a new email in a Scalahosting SPanel.
Choose a Username
To create a new email account, go to the email section of your SPanel User Interface and select ‘Email accounts’
Choose a username and click the drop-down menu to select the correct domain. Then, set your password.
Use a Strong Password
You might be unaware of the dangers of weak passwords, probably because you haven’t experienced a hack yet. To make sure you’re prioritizing security, the SPanel enforces a secure password.
Your password must be at least eight characters long, including at least one number, one letter, and one symbol.
The SPanel comes with a password generator, which saves you the time of creating a new password.
Save Password and Create Email
Click copy to transfer your new password to a safe place.
Once you’re done, click ‘Create Email.’
After you’ve created your email, it will appear in a list of existing email accounts below the completed form.
You can always access it through a webmail or through an email client with the settings from your welcome email.
What Is a Forwarding Email Address?
A forwarding email address is an alternative email address that allows you to forward your incoming messages to any email address you’ve assigned to receive them. They don’t have inboxes, so they don’t keep messages.
We often underestimate the usefulness of this type of email address and tend to waste time on tasks that it can handle. Instead of sending the same messages to every member of your team when there’s information, you can save that time for more important activities.
All you have to do is create a group account and set up forwarders. Once you send an email to the group, it goes to each members’ primary email account. That way, you don’t have to send multiple emails per time, and your team don’t have to open another email account.
It shares similarities with email aliases, except that it doesn’t have to end with the same domain as the receiving email. For instance, you can have messages sent to team@website.com to get forwarded to tonia@gmail.com.
Of course that’s not all you can do with a forwarding email. You can also use it for messages that you don’t want the sender to link to your primary email address.
Assuming you have a sales@website.com that allows your customers to make enquiries on your website. You can make that email address your forwarding email address that feeds into your primary email address.
That said, you can link multiple forwarding email addresses to a primary email account. Or, use one forwarding address for several primary emails.
Let’s see how it works.
Choose Your Forwarder
To create a new forwarding email account, go to the email section of your SPanel User Interface and select ‘Forwarders’
Fill the email address you’ll be forwarding from by entering the username in the first field and selecting domain from the dropdown menu.
Create The Connection
Fill the recipient email under ‘Forward to’ and click ‘Add forwarder.’
You’ll receive a success message that tells you that the first email can now forward any incoming message to the second email. And this information will also appear in your list of existing forwarders.
Weaknesses of a Forwarding Email Address
Despite the advantages of having forwarding email addresses, we can’t overlook areas where it falls short from the regular email address.
For example :
- Messages from the forwarding email address will mix up with those that were sent directly to the destination email.
- Forwarding can make spam filters become less accurate.
- Three email companies are involved in the forwarding process compared to regular email addresses. As a result, forwarding email addresses becomes less reliable when any of the parties has a problem.
You can’t use a forwarding email address as a regular email address and vice versa. However, you can always delete what you don’t need and replace it with what you need.
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