Email forwarding is the process of automatically redirecting a message from one email address to another.
For example, an organization might forward all messages sent to info@example.com to several team members’ inboxes, or an employee might forward mail from a personal account to a company address.
Forwarding is a common and convenient feature, but it can complicate email authentication, since the original sender and the forwarding server are often different.
When an email is forwarded, the forwarding mail server resends the message to a new destination. However, in doing so, it can change the message’s sending path and headers.
This creates a problem for authentication protocols like SPF and DKIM:
As a result, forwarded emails can appear suspicious to receiving servers, even when they’re perfectly legitimate.
Forwarding is especially common in organizations, mailing lists, and customer service systems, so ensuring those forwarded messages remain deliverable is critical.
Without safeguards, legitimate forwarded messages can be rejected or placed in spam folders due to authentication failures. This makes it important for senders to implement both DKIM and DMARC properly and for receivers to understand when to trust forwarded mail.
Newer standards like ARC (Authenticated Received Chain) help preserve authentication results across forwarding hops, ensuring that trusted messages are not penalized.
DMARCeye helps organizations visualize how forwarding affects their authentication results.
By analyzing DMARC reports, DMARCeye can identify when messages pass through intermediaries and where SPF or DKIM validation breaks. With this insight, teams can determine whether failed authentication results are caused by malicious spoofing or simply by forwarding behavior.
This visibility helps maintain both security and email deliverability while keeping legitimate forwarded traffic flowing smoothly.
Sign up for a free trial of DMARCeye today and start protecting your email domain.
To learn more about DMARC and DMARC-related terms, explore the DMARCeye Glossary.