Why We’ve Discontinued External Email forwarding
For many years, we provided external email forwarding as a convenience feature across the domains we host, allowing users to automatically route messages to third-party services like Gmail. While this worked historically, changes in the broader email ecosystem have made forwarding increasingly unreliable and, in some cases, harmful to overall mail delivery. We removed the ability to add traditional email forwards on our console interface in 2022 due to continuing issues forwarding email to some destinations, especially gmail. Since that time we have been removing forwards that were causing issues and recently removed all forwarding to gmail accounts.
Modern email systems enforce strict authentication standards to combat spam and spoofing. When a message is forwarded, these authentication mechanisms can break or appear invalid to the receiving server; even if the original message was legitimate. This increases the likelihood that forwarded mail will be flagged as spam or rejected and in some cases flag our servers as the spam source.
More importantly, these failures can negatively impact the sending reputation of our mail servers and domains as a whole. Since we host email for many domains and customers, maintaining a strong reputation is critical to ensuring consistent delivery for everyone. To protect the integrity and reliability of our email platform, we have discontinued support for this feature.
Changes to gmail fetching
Separately, Google is phasing out the POP3 “mail fetch” feature that allowed Gmail to periodically retrieve messages from external mailboxes. This has been a commonly used workaround to centralize email from multiple accounts into Gmail.
As this feature is retired, Gmail will no longer be able to automatically pull in messages from externally hosted accounts. While this change is out of our control, it does affect users who relied on Gmail as their primary interface for managing email hosted with us.
While we understand that gmail is suggesting forwarding as an alternative we know the other side of this as they will block some emails being forwarded and flag our servers as the source affecting all of our customers.
Moving forward
To ensure reliable access and full functionality moving forward, we recommend using a dedicated email client such as Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, Apple Mail, etc.
By configuring your account using IMAP, you can:
- Access all of your email in one place
- Keep messages synchronized across devices
- Send and receive mail directly without relying on forwarding or external retrieval
Most modern email clients support multiple accounts, you can still manage email from different providers (including Gmail) within a single interface.