The One Time You Absolutely Do Not Want to Use Email Forwarding
Quick Answer
Auto-forwarding email is routine but carries three real risks. (1) Copyright: every email is copyrighted by its author, and forwarding without permission can violate that, depending on volume and recipient. (2) Sensitive data leakage: forwarding rules silently push privileged content (legal, financial, HR, client data) to external addresses, which is a fiduciary problem for lawyers and a compliance problem for regulated industries. (3) Classified material: the absolute prohibition. Hillary Clinton's home server reportedly auto-forwarded State Department emails to a Gmail account registered to a Chinese company, exposing classified material to unknown parties. Defensive controls: disable user-defined external forwarding rules in Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, audit existing rules quarterly, and use a managed forwarding service for legitimate forwarding needs (alias-to-mailbox routing) so it isn't done from the user account.
Email forwarding is so common place, most people don’t give it another thought. But, as I pointed out in a recent post, email forwarding isn’t always smart to do.
In that post, I point out a handful of reasons why blindly forwarding emails can get you into a little hot water. First, there are the copyright issues. When someone writes an email, it is by definition, copyrighted. Depending on who you are forwarding it to, where and how often, you could be in violation of copyright law.
Then there’s the case of forwarding sensitive information. If you aren’t sure if an email contains sensitive information, auto forwarding it can be a cause for concern. This especially applies to lawyers and other fiduciaries who have a responsibility to protect client information.
While these email forwarding faux pas can be understood if not condoned, they pale in comparison to what former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did. According to recently declassified documents, “the FBI found in the metadata that every email sent and received on Clinton’s home brew server was being copied to an email address registered to a Chinese company named Carter Heavy Industries.”
She had an illegal email server and was knowingly or unknowingly forwarding classified State Department emails to a Chinese-related email account. Incredibly, it was a Gmail account so there’s no telling who actually had access to the emails.
The one time you absolutely do not want to use email forwarding is when you’re in receipt of classified emails. Assuming that’s not you, but you still need to forward emails, contact DuoCircle. With the DuoCircle email forwarding service you can accept emails at one domain and forward them to another email account on another domain without needing to run your own mail server.
You can create an unlimited number of email aliases and forward each alias to up to 10 other email addresses. And email forwarding comes natively with phishing protection, which keeps your forwarded emails free of viruses and spam. Try it risk free with a 30 day money back guarantee.
General Manager
General Manager at DuoCircle. Product strategy and commercial lead across the email security portfolio.
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