A forwarder redirects mail arriving at one address to another. Nothing is stored, there is no password, and there is nothing to configure in anyone's mail client. For addresses nobody logs into (info@, sales@, support@) it is almost always the better choice than a mailbox.
Creating one
In cPanel, open Forwarders and add one. Enter the address to forward and where it should go. Working immediately, nothing to propagate.
You can also forward an entire domain, sending everything addressed to any name at one domain to another domain. Useful when consolidating after a rename, and worth knowing it forwards mail to addresses that never existed too, which means spam aimed at random names arrives as well.
Why a forwarder beats a mailbox for role addresses
A mailbox stores mail against your disk quota, has a password that automated attacks target constantly, and needs someone to check it.
A forwarder has none of that. Mail lands in an inbox someone already reads, which is the actual goal.
Four role mailboxes nobody logs into is four sets of credentials to protect and four folders quietly filling with spam against your allocation. Four forwarders pointing at one real mailbox is a working arrangement with nothing to maintain.
Forwarding to an external provider breaks SPF
This is the part worth understanding before forwarding business mail to a personal account elsewhere.
When your server forwards a message, it becomes the sending server. The original sender's SPF record does not list your server, so the SPF check fails at the destination.
The DKIM signature still verifies, because the content was not altered, which is exactly why DKIM matters for forwarded mail and why both records are worth publishing.
But if the destination provider enforces a strict policy, forwarded mail can be rejected. Neither you nor the original sender is told. Mail simply stops arriving, intermittently, in a way that is very difficult to diagnose because it depends on each sender's own policy.
Where reliability matters, use a real mailbox here and have the external provider fetch from it rather than forwarding to it. Fetching does not involve a forwarding hop, so nothing breaks.
Keep a copy while forwarding
By default a forwarder passes mail on and keeps nothing. If the destination fails, the mail is gone with no local record.
Creating a mailbox and a forwarder for the same address keeps a copy on the server while still delivering to wherever you read mail. It uses disk, and it means a delivery failure downstream is recoverable.
Worth doing for anything commercially important, and unnecessary for a personal alias.
Catch-all: usually a mistake
The default address setting can send every message to a non-existent address at your domain somewhere instead of bouncing it.
It sounds useful, no mail lost to typos. In practice spammers send to thousands of guessed addresses at every domain, and a catch-all accepts all of it. The volume is substantial and it fills whatever it points at.
Set the default address to discard instead. A message to a mistyped address then bounces, and the sender learns to correct it, which is more useful than silently receiving it in a folder nobody reads.
The narrow exception: temporarily after a migration, while you find out which old addresses still receive mail.
Avoid forwarding loops
Forwarding A to B while B forwards to A produces a loop. Mail servers detect this and stop, but the result is failed delivery and a confusing bounce.
Longer chains are the version that actually happens: A forwards to B, B forwards to C, and C was set up months ago to forward to A. Review the whole forwarder list rather than each entry alone.
When someone leaves
Do not delete their mailbox. Convert the address to a forwarder pointing at whoever takes over.
People keep writing to an address for years. A forwarder means their mail reaches someone; a deleted mailbox means it bounces, and the sender concludes your company stopped responding.
Take a copy of the old mailbox before removing it: deleting a mailbox deletes its stored mail, with no recovery beyond your own backups.
Checking a forwarder works
Send a message to the forwarded address from an external account and confirm it arrives at the destination.
If it does not, check the spam folder at the destination first, forwarded mail failing SPF is exactly the mail that lands there. If it is not there either, check that the destination address is correct and the mailbox it points at is not full.
A forwarder pointing at a full mailbox produces a bounce, which is at least visible. A forwarder pointing at a deleted mailbox produces the same, weeks after the deletion, which is much harder to connect.
For the related case of replying automatically rather than redirecting, How to Set Up Email Autoresponders goes into the settings and the loops to avoid.
A handful of forwarders is almost always better than accepting mail for every possible address. How to Set Up a Catch-All Address and When Not To goes into it.
