This is the complete guide to automatic email forwarding in Microsoft 365. I’ll explain what email forwarding is, how it differs from email redirecting, and how to configure it for various scenarios.
- What is email forwarding?
- Why auto forward emails?
- How to auto forward emails in Microsoft 365?
- Advanced auto forwarding
- Example of use: auto forward invoices to Finance
- Other automatic forwarding use cases
- Blocking auto forwarding to external addresses
What is email forwarding?
Hate myself for writing the obvious part, but here it goes. Email forwarding is sending an email that reached you to another email address. It’s different from email redirecting, where an email goes to another email address straight away, never reaching the original recipient.
It does make a difference, especially when you are the intended recipient.
Why auto forward emails?
Forwarding emails manually isn’t rocket science. No matter what’s your email client, you click a dedicated button (Forward), add another recipient’s email address and send. Auto forwarding, on the other hand, happens without your interaction when certain conditions are met. There are some valid reasons for auto forwarding emails. And some rather sneaky. Here’s the short list of some of the possible uses:
- Redirecting emails sent to former employees. Yes, there are other ways to handle that, which might make more sense, like converting to a shared mailbox.
- Archiving, Backup & eDiscovery – while there are better ways to handle it, like dedicated archive policies, or, surprise, eDiscovery, auto forwarding can be treated as backup in this scenario. Backup for backup, so to speak.
- Sending customer emails to a shared customer service mailbox, instead of a specific technician, to give your customer’s ongoing support.
- Forwarding some or all company emails for out of office employees.
- Catch-all mailboxes (although here, an email redirect makes more sense).
Now for the possibly risky scenarios:
- If you don’t have access to company email on your mobile but want to always keep your finger on the pulse. This might come from a good place, but it still means company mail going out of company control.
- Forwarding company email on purpose. Even a temporary access to a mailbox creates an opportunity to set up an inbox rule that forwards emails outside the company. It’s hard to detect by the end-user and could go for a long time without anyone noticing. Unless you prepare for this.
While I’m sure there are user-made auto-forwarding scenarios, without ill will behind them, they still pose some risk. That’s why, at the end of the article, I’ll show you how to block those outbound email forwards.
How to auto forward emails in Microsoft 365?
Below, I’ll list the native methods you can use to auto-forward emails. Remember what I wrote about risks? Well, those risks were all about why someone forwards emails and where to. There is another kind of risk I haven’t mentioned yet:
Email loop.
Yep, whenever you work with email forwarding, automatic responses or both (those mechanisms are almost the same), there is a risk that you will configure them to bounce infinitely. Keep that in mind when configuring either mechanism. You can also jump right to Advanced auto forwarding to see the smart way to prevent indefinite automatic forwarding.
Exchange admin center: mailboxes
When you go to mailboxes in Exchange admin center, you can click on any user to set up auto email forwarding for them.
When you switch the forwarding toggle on, you’ll be able to set up some basics – the target address and whether you want to set up forwarding or redirecting:
Useful? Definitely! Especially when a user is going to be out of office for a long time and their emails need to be handled. I’m sure you’ll see some obvious cons here:
- No way to schedule the auto-forwarder.
- Available options are limited, to say the least. You can either turn it on or off, with no way to influence how the emails look, or apply the feature only to some emails.
Exchange admin center: mail flow rules
There are 3 actions that allow you to almost auto forward emails.
- Forward the message for approval. Not that it’s not useful, it has some limited functionality, though.
- Redirect the message to. Again, a useful option, but it’s not the forwarding. When you redirect a message, the original recipient never gets it. There are far more scenarios in which it makes more sense to auto forward email after it reaches the intended recipient.
- Add recipients. It can act as ‘kind-of-forwarding’ an email. This action will help you in a lot of scenarios but doesn’t allow for the option to get the original email unaffected and then forward a modified version later on.
For more details on how to set up mail flow rules you can visit this Microsoft page.
Automatic email forwarding in Outlook
I’m just mentioning this as an option, because it is possible to forward emails with inbox rules. The thing is, it might not be the best idea. That’s why I will focus on the reasons why not to use inbox rules for the sake of forwarding.
- Outlook rules can be modified by end-users.
- Using PowerShell to introduce server-side rules usually breaks the ones that users configured. Outlook rules are still widely used to make Outlook more of a friendly place. Breaking those carefully configured rules will make people angry.
If, regardless of the warning, you still want to use inbox rules, here’s an article that explains the whole thing:
Learn more about Outlook rules and how to manage them with PowerShell
None of the solutions I’ve shown is perfect. Like you could have suspected, I’ve saved the best method for last.
Advanced auto forwarding
You can set up automatic forwarding of email with CodeTwo Autoresponder for Microsoft 365. Why is it that much better? In a nutshell:
- Advanced rules let you handle any forwarding scenario.
- You can schedule your auto forwarding rules, so that auto forwarding starts and ends whenever you need.
- You can use the Limiter feature to prevent email loops.
- And the best part? It’s all a part of CodeTwo Email Signatures 365 – the world leading email signature and branding tool.
So, let me show you how to set up a sample email forwarding rule.
Example of use: auto forward invoices to Finance
There are many use cases in which forwarding is useful. I’ve chosen a scenario which is common in many organizations.
Problem
Your company gets a lot of invoices via email. That’s normal. But in most cases, they are delivered to different addresses. Every team needs to forward those invoices to the Finance team. Result? Some of the invoices are not forwarded, some services your Marketing team needs, stop working, because an invoice was not paid. In short, it’s chaos.
Solution
You could argue that it’s not a problem in your company, because all invoices get to the Finance team effectively. For example, because of your superior company culture. Good for you. However, automatic forwarding can help you in many ways:
- You don’t need to worry about it, so you can focus and spend more time on more ambitious tasks.
- If the Finance Team isn’t the intended recipient, there’s probably a good reason for that. Since it’s forwarding and not redirecting, everyone who needs the invoice gets it.
Win-win.
How to set it up
- Sign in or sign up to CodeTwo Email Signatures 365.
Here are some technical details on how to set up CodeTwo Autoresponder.
- Go to app.codetwo.com and create a new autoresponder rule:
- Name it:
- Then, in the Reply from tab, decide when the rule should be triggered. It makes sense to apply it whenever anyone from your company (except from Finance) gets an email.
- The Reply to tab lets you decide senders whose emails should be forwarded. Exceptions are a good place to exclude email addresses or domains that are suspicious.
- Now, the Keywords tab lets you specify when to apply the rule. For example, you can set it up whenever email subject includes the word invoice. You can play around with various keywords to fine tune your rule.
- For this particular scenario, Scheduler tab doesn’t have a lot of use. That doesn’t mean you should ignore it entirely, it lets you easily configure start and end date of a forwarding rule (for example, for those out of office forwarding cases). The Limiter is the perfect way to prevent email loops – it lets you control how many automatic replies or forwards will be sent in a specific time frame:
- The Logic step lets you control how this rule works with other rules. For example, if the rule is applied, you can stop processing more rules.
- Design lets you decide who will get the auto forward, what will be the From address and whether you want to include the original email as an attachment or below in the thread and more. Placeholders like {Original Sender} are automatically converted to values whenever the rule is triggered. To use autoresponder for forwarding, add the intended recipients to the To, Cc or Bcc field.
- When you click Edit reply message, you can modify the looks of your forwarding message. Again, you can use placeholders to add message details or user data automatically. It’s a good idea to mention this is an automatically forwarded email, add some context, and remind about email security.
When you finish and save your rule, it will start auto-forwarding emails of your choice. In the scenario presented above, The Finance team will be aware of all invoices that other teams get.
The autoresponder feature used for forwarding in this scenario doesn’t allow forwarding attachments. So, if you still get invoices as PDF attachments, the Finance team will need to have those sent separately. This gives the original recipient a chance to verify the invoice validity, before sending it onwards.
Other automatic email forwarding use cases
That’s just one of the possible uses. Some of the other good automatic forwarding examples include:
- Sending suspicious emails to the Security Team.
- Sending direct support requests to a shared mailbox.
- Auto forwarding emails sent to people who are out of office.
Blocking auto forwarding to external addresses
As I mentioned before, most automatic forwarding outside the company should be carefully watched. This section shows how to deal with those.
Finding out external auto forwarding used to be a problem – there are some stories about those rules running undetected for weeks, before anyone noticed data breach. Now, if you go to the Exchange admin center (and you haven’t personalized it too much), you will see the following tile (amongst the other ones):
If it looks the same for you, then great. If the number is different, you might have a problem. It’s easy to prevent auto-forwards though, and I’ll show you how.
You can block auto forwarding with a simple mail flow rule.
- Go to the Exchange admin center > Mail flow > Rules (this link should take you there) and create a new rule.
- Use the following settings:
- Name: Block auto-forwarding
- Apply this rule if: The recipient > is external/internal > Outside organization AND The message properties > include the message type > Auto-Forward.
- Do the following: Block the message > delete the message without notifying anyone.
You can also use the action “Generate incident report and send it to” to make things personal and make it easier to interrogate the suspect about the auto-forwarding rule. But even when you don’t use this action, message tracing will let you target each forwarding attempt.
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