How to forward your email to a new address (Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo)

Changing your email address feels like one of those jobs you have to do all at once — tell everyone, update every account, hope you did not forget anything important. You don't. Forwarding lets your old address quietly pass everything to the new one while you move things across at your own pace.

It takes about two minutes to set up, and there is a security reason to know where the setting lives even if you never plan to move.

What forwarding actually does

When forwarding is on, mail arriving at your old address is automatically sent on to the new one. You read everything in one place, and nobody who writes to your old address notices anything.

What it does not do is just as important:

• It does not move your old mail. Messages already sitting in the old inbox stay there. Forwarding only affects what arrives from now on.
• It does not change where you send from. Reply to a forwarded message and it goes out from your new address — which is usually what you want, but it does mean people will notice the change gradually.
• It does not close the old account. The old inbox is still live and still needs a strong password and multi-factor authentication, because it remains the recovery address for anything you have not migrated yet. Our guide on securing an email account before a takeover covers what that means in practice.

Gmail

1. Open Gmail on a computer and click the gear icon, then See all settings.
2. Go to the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab.
3. Click Add a forwarding address and type the new address.
4. Google sends a confirmation code to that address. Open it there and click the link, or paste the code back into Gmail.
5. Back in the Forwarding tab, select Forward a copy of incoming mail to and choose what happens to the original — keep it in the inbox, archive it, or delete it. Keeping a copy is the safe default while you are still settling in.
6. Save changes at the bottom. It is easy to miss and nothing takes effect without it.

Outlook.com

1. Open Outlook in a browser and click the gear icon, then Mail in the settings panel.
2. Choose Forwarding.
3. Tick Enable forwarding and enter the new address.
4. Decide whether to keep a copy of forwarded messages — again, worth leaving on at first.
5. Save.

If you use a work or school Outlook account, your administrator may have forwarding switched off entirely. That is a deliberate policy, not a fault.

Yahoo Mail

1. Click the gear icon, then More Settings.
2. Go to Mailboxes and click the account you want to forward.
3. Under Forwarding, enter the new address and Verify.
4. Confirm through the email Yahoo sends to the new address.

Some Yahoo plans restrict forwarding to paid tiers. If the option is missing, that is usually why.

Menus in all three services move around from time to time. If the wording above does not match what you see, search the provider's own help for "forwarding" rather than guessing at a similar-looking setting.

The security part most guides leave out

Here is the reason to know this setting even if you are staying put.

Setting up a forwarding rule is one of the most common things an attacker does after breaking into an inbox. It is quiet, it survives a password change, and it means a copy of everything you receive — password resets, bank notices, personal messages — arrives at an address you know nothing about. The victim usually notices nothing at all, because their mail still lands normally.

So while you are in that settings screen, read what is already there:

• Is there a forwarding address you do not recognise? Remove it, then change your password and sign out of all sessions.
• Are there filters or rules that forward, archive or delete certain messages? Attackers often add a rule that files away security alerts so you never see the warning.
• Does your account show recent activity from places you have not been?

If any of that turns up something, treat it as a live compromise and work through the takeover checklist linked above rather than just deleting the rule.

If you are switching for privacy reasons

Plenty of people set up forwarding because they are moving away from an ad-funded provider. If that is you, the practical order is: open the new account, turn on forwarding at the old one, update your most important logins over a few weeks, and only then think about closing anything.

Providers funded by subscription rather than advertising do not have the same reason to read what is in your mail — Proton Mail is the best-known of them and has a free tier you can point forwarding at while you decide.

Look at Proton Mail →

The short version

Turn on forwarding, keep a copy at the old address for a while, and move your logins across when you have a spare ten minutes rather than all in one go. And whichever provider you are on, check that forwarding screen occasionally — an address there that you did not put there is one of the clearest warning signs you will ever get.