cPanel Reseller Tutorials – Email Aliases and Forwarders
In our previous cPanel reseller tutorial I gave you some helpful instructions about how to create a new mail auto responder with the cPanel control panel. This week, I will cover another important email feature of the cPanel control panel – the setup of email aliases and email forwarding. And since no one likes to read boring explanations of features and specifications, I have prepared a step-by-step guide on how to create an email alias or a forwarder. To better illustrate the presented instructions, I have added a video tutorial as well.
Email aliases
The e-mail alias is not a real email address, but can in some cases act as such. It’s capable of receiving emails, but instead of storing them, it automatically forwards them to a real mailbox. This way, you can create various mailboxes for a complex website, but have them all pointing to a single email address. With an email alias in action, all emails will be stored in the original mailbox, while the alias mailbox will always remain empty.
Email Forwarding
Email forwarding is similar to the function of the email alias – all emails received in a mailbox with an active email forwarding option will be automatically sent to a different mailbox. However, with email forwarding on, the emails will be stored in the mailbox, which originally received them. The advantage of email forwarding is that it can send the emails to a different mail server – for example to your Yahoo or Gmail mailbox.
How to set up e-mail aliases and forwarders
Creating an email alias or an mail forwarder through the cPanel control panel is easy and I will show you how to do that in a few very simple steps.
In the cPanel control panel, locate the mail menu. It’s usually located between the first menu items. In the X3 cPanel skin, this menu is found on the main screen, with all of its sub-menus included, while in the X3 skin, you have to click on the “Mail” icon to access the mail menu features.
1. Enter the “Forwarders” sub-menu. This is the place from where you can create both an alias and an email forwarder.
2. You will be taken to a page, showing you the currently active email aliases and forwarders. If you haven’t created any, you will see two empty tables. Click on “Add Forwarder” to create a new forwarder.
3. This will take you to the forwarder creation page. You will have to fill in several fields :
Address to forward – enter the email address, which you want to be forwarded. For an email forwarder, the address needs to be created beforehand. If you are creating an email alias, you don’t need to have the mailbox created before that, simply enter it here.
Forward to a mail address – here you should enter the mail address to which the messages will be sent.
4. Click on “Add forwarder” to create the new email alias of forwarder.
And you are ready. A new message will come up, confirming the successful creation of the new mail forwarder or alias.
Originally published Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 1:35 pm, updated July 2, 2024 and is filed under cPanel Support.
Tags: reseller tutorials, video tutorials, cPanel, email, email alias, cPanel control panel, cPanel skins, autoresponder, mail, email forwarder, cPanel features