Set up email forwarding

Email forwarding is a free option to use your domain name in your email address by forwarding emails to your personal inbox. This guide will show you how to set up email forwarding.

With Email Forwarding, you can create a virtual email address on your domain name that forwards emails to your real email address. You can add email forwarding to any domain name connected to your site, but not to the default site address (i.e., addresses ending in .wordpress.com).

For example, if your domain name is yourgroovydomain.com, you can create a pseudo email handle like hello@yourgroovydomain.com. Anyone can email that address, and you will receive it in your personal email inbox, like jane.doe@gmail.com. When you reply to a forwarded email, the recipient will see it as coming from jane.doe@gmail.com. It is not possible to send emails from an email forwarding address—only receive them in your personal inbox.

• Administrators on sites with the Free, Personal, and Premium plans can add 25 email forwards for each domain name.
• Administrators on sites with the Business and Commerce plans can add 100 email forwards for each domain name.

To receive and send emails on your domain name with a dedicated email inbox, you can sign up for Professional Email or Google Workspace through your WordPress.com account.

Email forwarding will be unavailable if you have signed up for a fully hosted email service like Professional Email or Google Workspace. You can set up forwarding or aliases directly with these services. If you wish to only use free email forwarding, cancel your other email service to access email forwarding again.

For important communications such as receiving emails from your bank or government, use a fully-hosted email service instead of forwarding.

To set up a new email forward:

1. Visit your site’s dashboard.
2. Navigate to Upgrades → Emails (or Hosting → Emails if using WP Admin) to view email options for your domain name.
   • If you have multiple domain names on your site, you will first need to click the “Add Email” button to the right of the domain name to which you wish to add email forwarding.
3. At the bottom of the page, click the “Start with Email Forwarding” link.

4. Fill out the following fields:
   • Forward from: the name of your new email address (what appears before the @ symbol only.)
   • Forward to: the destination email, typically your personal email address. You can add multiple email addresses here, separated by commas.
5. After entering these settings, click the “Confirm forwards” button:

6. You will receive an activation email at the destination address you specified. Click the link in the email to complete the email forwarding setup.

If you haven’t clicked the link in the activation email, you will see an “Activation required” warning on the Emails page. You can resend the activation email to your inbox by clicking the ⋮ and selecting the “Resend” option.

Once you’ve set up an email forward, you can test it by sending an email to the forwarding address. This must be done from a different email account than the one you are forwarding to.

If the email forwarding doesn’t work, two common reasons are:

Ensure you don’t have an existing mail host connected. If you have an existing mail provider and are no longer using it, you’ll need to remove the DNS records for that email service from your domain name. To remove the existing mail host:

1. Go to your Domains page (Upgrades → Domains or Hosting → Domains) and select your domain name.
2. Select “DNS records” and click the “Manage” button.
3. Remove all the DNS records related to your email host. This will likely include MX and possibly A and CNAME records. See more information about managing your DNS records.

Double-check that your domain’s name servers are pointing to WordPress.com. To check this:

1. Go to your Domains page (Upgrades → Domains or Hosting → Domains) and select your domain name.
2. Select the “Name servers” option.
3. Verify that “Use WordPress.com name servers” is switched on. See more information about changing your domain’s name servers.

To delete an existing email forward:

1. Visit your site’s dashboard.
2. Navigate to Upgrades → Emails (or Hosting → Emails if using WP Admin).
3. Click the three dots next to an email forwarding address and then click the “Remove email forward” option.

You can edit an email forward by deleting an existing one and setting up a new one with the updated settings.