Back E-Mail-Weiterleitung German Retpoŝta plusendado Esperanto Reenvío de correo electrónico Spanish Email forwarding Italian Przekierowanie poczty elektronicznej Polish
Email forwarding generically refers to the operation of re-sending a previously delivered email to an email address to one or more different email addresses.
The term forwarding, used for mail since long before electronic communications, has no specific technical meaning,[1] but it implies that the email has been moved "forward" to a new destination.
Email forwarding can also redirect mail going to a certain address and send it to one or more other addresses. Vice versa, email items going to several different addresses can converge via forwarding to end up in a single address in-box.[clarification needed]
Email users and administrators of email systems use the same term when speaking of both server-based and client-based forwarding.
- ^ In section 3.9.2 List of RFC 5321, the term forwarding is used ambiguously. It notes that "the key difference between handling aliases (Section 3.9.1) and forwarding (this subsection) is the change to the [Return-Path header]." That wording, new w.r.t. RFC 2821, could be interpreted as the definition of forwarding, if the same term weren't used at the beginning of the same subsection with the opposite meaning. As a contributor to RFC 5321 agreed, Tony Finch (2008-11-03). "English terms for forwarded addresses". IETF. Archived from the original on 2008-12-11. Retrieved 2008-11-07.
[forwarding is] a fuzzy (non-technical) term in SMTP