Quote:
Originally Posted by minimalist
Having recently done both, I would say they are similar levels of difficulty.
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For the initial setup, yes, however forwarding has several pitfalls when it comes to things like spam filters.
Firstly, unless your forwarding service provides good spam filters of its own, you'll likely get a lot more spam since forwarding negates the ability for RBL lists to be used. For example, there are a lot of messages that services like Gmail won't even
accept if they're being delivered from known sources of spam. However if you're forwarding from another service, Gmail sees everything as coming from your forwarding server, so it will accept anything that gets passed on. This puts the onus for anti-spam filtering on the forwarding service. Any good provider like Gmail will still be able to heuristically drop those messages into the spam folder, but unless your forwarding service is handling RBLs to block inbound spam at the session level, you're going to get a lot more blatant spam showing up in your spam folder.
On the flip side, you may find more legitimate messages being classified as spam for the same reasons. Some domains have an policy (in the form of SPF/DMARC records in DNS) that authorize only specific servers to send mail from their domain. In this case, messages from those domains that pass through your forwarding server may get incorrectly flagged as spam because again, similar to the problem above, the messages are being delivered by your forwarding server, with isn't authorized to send for that domain. For example, if Hotmail.com published a list of specific servers allowed to send e-mail from "Hotmail.com" and Gmail receives a message from your forwarding server with a "Hotmail.com" from address, it's going to consider that more likely to be spam.
Using an e-mail provider that hosts your domain name and lets you point your MX record directly to them eliminates these issues, since at that point all of your messages are coming in directly, rather than being forwarded through a third-party service. It's also worth keeping in mind that some of the better email providers can handle the MX/DMARC/SPF records for you if you're willing to just let them handle your domain name hosting entirely, and even those that don't will usually provide you with "template" records that you can copy and paste into your own DNS hosting provider, saving you the trouble of having to figure those out yourself.