Forward an Address Without a Mailbox

Sometimes you want an address on your domain that simply passes mail on to somewhere else. sales@yourcompany.com should land in a colleague's Gmail. invoices@clientdomain.com should reach the client's accountant. Nobody needs to log in, and nothing needs to be stored.

That is what a forwarding address is: an address that exists only to hand mail on. There is no mailbox behind it, no password to manage, and no copy of the mail kept on our servers.

When to use one

A forwarding address is the right tool when:

• The recipient already has an inbox they live in. A client who reads everything in Gmail does not want a second place to check.
• You manage domains for other people. Agencies often hold a dozen client domains where mail only needs to arrive somewhere the client already uses.
• The address is functional, not personal. press@, invoices@, careers@ — a destination, not a person.
• You are keeping a domain alive after a move. Mail to old addresses keeps reaching someone while the domain is retired.

Use a mailbox instead when the person needs to send mail from that address, keep an archive, or use webmail. Use an alias when the mail should land in a TrekMail mailbox you already have — see Creating and Managing Aliases.

How it differs from catch-all

Both send mail somewhere else, but they answer different questions.

Most domains want forwarding addresses for day-to-day work and catch-all switched off. Leaving catch-all on long-term means every dictionary guess a spammer makes gets delivered somewhere.

Setting one up

1. Open Domains, pick the domain, and go to the Routing tab.
2. Scroll to Forwarding addresses and click Add address.
3. Type the part before the @ — for example sales.
4. Add one or more recipients. Mail is delivered to all of them.
5. Save. Changes reach our mail servers within about half a minute.

The domain does not need any mailboxes for this to work. A domain can exist purely to forward mail.

Pausing instead of deleting

Every address has a pause control. A paused address keeps its recipients but stops delivering — mail sent to it bounces as though the address does not exist. Resume it and the previous recipients come straight back.

Reach for pause when you want to stop mail for a while without losing the setup. Deleting is permanent and you would have to type the recipients again.

Checking whether mail is arriving

Each address shows when mail last came through it. Click that and you get the recent history for that address: the time, who wrote in, which recipient it was handed to, and what the receiving server answered — including messages that spam filtering stopped before they were forwarded, which is the usual explanation for "my client says they sent it and nothing arrived".

The history covers the last 30 days on Agency. Older entries are removed, so this is a tool for answering questions about recent mail rather than an archive.

Moving from another provider

If you already run forwarding somewhere else, you do not have to retype it. Click Import at the bottom of the section and choose where you are moving from:

• Cloudflare — reads your Email Routing rules. If you connected Cloudflare for DNS, we use the token you already gave us, so there is nothing to paste.
• ImprovMX — reads your domains and aliases with an API key from Account Settings → API Keys.
• CSV — one rule per line: the address, then its recipients separated by commas.

Whatever you choose, we only ever read from the other provider. Nothing there is changed or deleted, so your current setup keeps running until you point your MX records at us.

Before anything is created you get a preview: every address that will be imported, and every one that will be skipped with the reason — an address already used by a mailbox, a domain not yet added here, or a rule shape we do not import. Tick the domains you want and confirm.

Two things do not come across, by design. Catch-all rules from the other provider are a domain-wide setting, so set those under Catch-all inbox. Wildcard addresses like *@yourdomain.com are the same thing under another name.

You can also Export CSV at any time, in exactly the format the import accepts.

What it costs and the limits

Forwarding addresses do not use storage and do not count against your mailbox allowance — those are separate numbers. On the Agency plan you can have 300 forwarding addresses per domain, each delivering to up to 15 recipients.

On other plans you can set up to 25 addresses per domain and save them, but they will not deliver until the account is on Agency. Nothing is lost in the meantime: the rules sit there, marked as saved and inactive, and start working the moment the plan changes. You never have to enter them twice.

How much you can forward

Forwarded mail counts towards the same daily sending allowance as everything else your account sends — one number to keep track of rather than two. On the Agency plan that is 40,000 messages a day, comfortably above what forwarding for a portfolio of client domains uses.

If an account runs past that, or past its hourly rate, forwarding pauses on its own and the Routing tab says so. Nothing is deleted and nothing needs fixing: delivery resumes by itself when the window rolls over.

Things worth knowing

One address, one job. An address can be a mailbox or a forwarding address, not both. If you try to create a mailbox on an address that already forwards, we stop you and say where to remove it — otherwise the mailbox would look fine and quietly never receive anything.

No loops. Forwarding an address back into the same domain, or into a chain that eventually returns to it, is refused. A loop would bounce mail between servers until someone noticed.

Spam is filtered first. Mail is checked before it is forwarded, so junk aimed at your addresses does not get passed on to your client's inbox.

Sender checks stay intact. We rewrite the technical sender information as mail passes through, which is what keeps Gmail and Outlook from treating forwarded mail as forged.

Replies come from wherever you read them. A forwarding address receives; it does not send. If the recipient replies from their Gmail, the reply comes from their Gmail address. When you need to answer as the address, create a mailbox instead.

Doing it in bulk

Listing, creating, changing and removing addresses all work over the API and through our MCP tools, so an agency can set up a new client domain in one scripted step. The response also tells an agent whether the rules are actually delivering, which matters on a plan that only stores them.

The delivery history is available too, so an agent can check whether a client's mail is actually arriving instead of only whether a rule exists.

One thing stays in the dashboard: the import wizard. It is a one-off move with a preview you are meant to read before anything is created — and everything it creates is visible over the API afterwards.

See Connecting AI Agents for the tool list and API Overview for the endpoints.