This help page describes how to set up automatic forwarding for your mail. For information on manually forwarding a message or conversation, please see our Forwarding messages help page.
You can set up a rule to forward all of your mail from Fastmail to another email inbox by following these steps:
- Open the Settings → Filters & Rules screen and click Create rule.
- For the condition, choose the All messages option and click Continue.
- Select the Send a copy to action and enter in the email address you would like to forward mail to.
- Click Save to save the rule.
You can also create specific conditions for these rules so that messages will only be forwarded if they follow certain patterns. For more information, please see our Filters & Rules help page.
Note that a forwarding rule will not apply to any message caught by discard rules, or any message filtered as spam. If a legitimate message is flagged as spam, clicking marking it as Not spam will allow the message to be forwarded according to your rules.
Specific address forwarding
If you want to forward all mail that is sent to a specific alias, you can do this by directly setting up a target address for that alias.
The main differences between this approach and using a rule are:
- The address forwarding will apply to all messages sent to that specific address. There is no way to only forward emails that only meet a particular criteria.
- Forwarding emails through specific addresses will mean that spam protection is not run before these messages are sent out. If you would like the messages to be run through Fastmail's spam filter first, forward them by creating a rule.
You can use the Settings → My email addresses screen to set up a target address for your alias.
Known issues with email forwarding
While forwarding is an easy way to send a copy of the email you received to a different address, forwarded emails may not always be successfully delivered, for a few reasons.
Forwarding breaks SPF
SPF (Sender Policy Framework) lets the recipient check that the system that sent the email for a particular domain is authorized to do so. SPF is a standard followed by most reliable email services, as it helps to prevent spoofing and protects email services' reputation for reliable mail delivery.
Unfortunately, SPF breaks when emails are forwarded. As an example, if someone sends from Outlook.com to Fastmail, and the Fastmail account is set to forward all messages to Gmail, the SPF check for the forwarded message will fail, because Fastmail is not allowed to deliver mail for @outlook.com addresses.
DKIM signing the emails can help reduce these issues.
Recent shift to stricter SPF policies
We’ve noticed that various email providers have increased the strictness of authentication checks recently. For example, Gmail has started to bounce emails that fail SPF checks, even if it’s a soft fail when the email is not DKIM signed. This means that you may see an increase in issues with forwarded emails.
We are working with other email providers (including Gmail) to mitigate the issue, but there are a few things you can do to prevent the issue:
- You can set up forwarding with SRS rewriting enabled instead of regular forwarding.
- You can set up the external account to fetch emails using IMAP/POP from your Fastmail account instead of forwarding.