Forwarding VS Fetching, What’s the Difference?
Is your domain-related email set for forwarding or fetching in your third party aggregator? Let's talk about it!
Nearly everyone uses email, both for personal matters and professional. It’s important to know how your email is set up to ensure you reliably receive your emails. Today we will go over fetching vs forwarding settings for your domain-related email, and our recommendation for the best setup.
Fetching
Fetching is the preferred method for accessing your domain-related emails using a third-party email aggregator. For example, I (Hannah) have my personal email set to fetch my hannah@podcreative.ca emails as I vastly prefer using Gmail to respond to emails as opposed to the server webmail. Not only is the functionality way better, but the ease of use and responsiveness is also unparalleled. To be clear, you don’t have to use Gmail! Many people use Outlook as their email aggregator as it’s very popular. Check out this tutorial on how to set it up!
Setting up fetching is also referred to using POP3 or IMAP settings for your email. To set up your fetching you’ll need to access the settings of your third-party aggregator and follow the steps to set up an account to fetch emails. You will need the password of your domain-related email as well as the server name and port number.
This post provides step-by-step instructions on how to do so.
Important!
It’s our professional opinion, and that of many people, that you should only have your emails set up to fetching, never forwarding.
Forwarding
When your emails are set to forward this means that a forwarder was set up in the back end of your email. When it comes to domain-related emails, i.e. hannah@podcreative.ca, to set up a forwarder I would need to access the Cpanel of the domain and set the forwarder there. If you use Gmail or another email provider you can set up a forwarder in the settings of your email.
Essentially, when you set up email forwarding when an email is received by your email (i.e. hannah@podcreative.ca) it is immediately forwarded to your email aggregator (i.e. 1234@gmail.com). The problem is it forwards every single email received, whether it’s spam or not. This creates a problem as forwarding spam emails damages your IP reputation and incorrectly marks every single email you send as spam.
Wrapping this up
If your email is set up to forward from your domain-related email to your third-party aggregator (i.e. Gmail) we strongly suggest you change your setup to fetching. POP3 is our go-to as it’s reliable and quick!
