How to Setup Free Email Forwarding on Your Domain Names

As a domain investor, I’m constantly trying to find new ways to market my domain names.  As an avid listener to the Domain Name Wire Podcast, I’ve heard them mention more than once that setting up email forwarding on your domains could help you find a potential buyer for your domain.  For example, if domain example.com is consistently receiving email intended for domain example.net, you could reach out to the owner of example.net, explain to them that you’re the owner of example.com and you noticed that you’re receiving x number of emails daily or weekly intended for users on their domain.  This could start a conversation that could lead to a sale.  In this article, I’m going to discuss barriers I experienced to email forwarding, and walk you through a step-by-step solution by showing you how to setup free email forwarding on your domain names.

Barriers to email forwarding

1. My for-sale-landing-pages are set up through efty.com, and in order to do that, I had to change the domain nameservers to efty.com nameservers.  As a side effect, any MX Records I setup for that domain would not work once the nameservers have been updated to efty.com.  Not being able to configure MX Records meant I was unable to manage routing of mail flow through the domain.
2. Email forwarding does not work with GoDaddy, and I’ve finally stopped asking for their help.  I have followed the instructions provided by GoDaddy, and have spoken with them by chat and phone, and they either won’t help or are unable to help.  You can see in the the image below I don’t have the option to redeem Email Forwarding.  Once I even had a GoDaddy representative tell me I already had this service enabled; they could not tell me how, nor verify it, and I’ve never received email from any of my domains.  I was able to determine their statement was untruthful by simply attempting to send email to that domain.

I have other domains hosted through Dynadot and have experienced similar issues.   Since there are many third party services to assist in this, I think it’s safe to say most registrars aren’t interested in dealing with the hassle of providing this service.

solutions to email forwarding

Utilizing improvmx.com, i’m going to show you how to setup free email forwarding on your domain names.  Using Improvmx.com, you can forward *@example.com (anything sent to any user @example.com) to your email account of choice for up to 10 domains free.  If you want to have more than 10 domains with them, you can pay $9 per month for the service.

I also use Efty.com to setup the for-sale-landing-pages for my domain names listed for sale; I also use this service for basic record keeping of my portfolio.  Efty is a great service I highly recommend – however, this presented a problem for me in this instance.  A solution I found  was instead of changing my nameservers to efty.com nameservers, I setup domain forwarding with masking.  I will explain how to complete each step below.

Setting Up Domain Forwarding

Here are the steps I used to setup domain forwarding so that my Efty.com for-sale-landing-pages still worked as expected.

• First you’ll need to add 2 MX records for every domain you want to forward through ImprovMX.com, as follows:

Host: @
Value: mx1.improvmx.com
Priority: 10

Host: @
Value: mx2.improvmx.com
Priority: 20

• Secondly, If your domain name is registered through GoDaddy, you can select the domain/s and select the “forwarding domains” dropdown, show below.

• on the next screen select “Forward with masking” and enter text, as follows, into the fields.
  • beside “forward to” select https:// then in the text box to the right enter eftymarket.com/yourdomainname.com
  • under “forward type” select Forward with masking – this will expand the next section
  • for “Title” I entered my domain name and TLD
  • for “Description” I entered keywords for the domain
  • for “Keywords” I entered keywords for the domain
  • select save

Setting Up email forwarding Through ImprovMX.com

First, you’ll need to go to ImprovMX.com and setup a free account. Then navigate to your dashboard and enter your domain, as shown below:

• enter your domain name, as shown below and click “Create a free alias”

• this will add the domain to your dashboard
• after your MX Record have propogated, select “check again” and it will turn green to notify you this is setup properly.

Congrats – you now know how to setup free email forwarding on your domain names.  You’re email forwarding is all setup, and your landing pages through efty.com also work as expected.  If this article added value, would you please take a few moments to like our Facebook page, follow up on Twitter, and LinkedIn, and subscribe to jasonofflorida.com.  If you have feedback, comments or questions, please leave a note for me below.  Happy Domaining!