Why Email Forwarding Doesn’t Work Anymore (And What You Can Do Instead)
By Leo A. Notenboom, rewritten for easy reading
Email forwarding used to be helpful. Now, it can cause problems.
For a long time, people liked to forward their emails. That means you could have one email (like you@randomisp.com) and have all the messages sent to that address go to another one, like your Gmail account. This way, everything was in one place.
But today, that can cause your emails to get lost.
My friend Randy Cassingham talked about how this problem is messing up his newsletter. I want to explain it too, so you know how to fix it.
The Short Answer:
Don’t forward email anymore.
Forwarding email can make you miss important messages. Instead, use something called POP3 to pull emails from your other accounts. Or use an email app like Outlook or Thunderbird.
What is email forwarding?
Let’s say you have lots of email addresses:
Instead of checking each one, you can set them all to forward emails to your Gmail.
So when someone emails you@randomisp.com:
- The email goes to your randomisp.com account.
- It’s automatically sent (forwarded) to your Gmail.
- You check Gmail and see everything in one place.
This was super handy because Gmail is good at finding spam and organizing messages.
But now, forwarding email like this can stop messages from getting to you at all.
Why forwarding doesn’t work well anymore
When you forward everything — including junk mail — it makes your email provider (like randomisp.com) look bad. Big companies like Google might think it’s sending lots of spam.
So they may block your messages or send them to the spam folder. That means you might not even see them.
Another problem: Permission to send
Let’s say I send a newsletter from leo@askleo.com using a company called Aweber.
I’ve told the internet that Aweber is allowed to send emails for me. This is done with something called SPF and DKIM. These tools help stop bad guys from pretending to be me.
But if you use you@randomisp.com to get my newsletter and then forward it to Gmail, Gmail sees randomisp.com trying to send something from askleo.com. It says, “Hey, that’s not allowed,” and throws it into spam or deletes it.
What should you do instead?
Use POP3.
POP3 is a way to pull email from one place to another.
Instead of having randomisp.com push (forward) the email to Gmail, you can set Gmail to pull the email from randomisp.com. That means Gmail goes and gets your messages instead of them being pushed to Gmail.
This works better because Gmail knows it’s asking for the email, so it won’t think it’s spam.
Another idea: Use an email app
You can also use an email program like:
- Outlook
- Thunderbird
- Or other email apps
With these, you can:
- Check emails from lots of addresses (like Gmail and randomisp.com).
- Use one place to send and read all your messages.
- Set it up on your computer, phone, or tablet.
This is a strong and safe way to handle your email.
When forwarding still works
Forwarding can still work if the email stays in the same domain.
For example, if both emails are from randomisp.com, like:
That’s okay. It’s all happening inside one place, so the email doesn’t get marked as spam.
You can even tell where the email came from by which address it was sent to. That’s helpful to catch if someone gave away your email.
What to remember
Spammers (people who send junk mail) caused these problems. Email companies now have more rules to stop spam — but those rules also make forwarding harder.
So:
✅ Only forward email inside the same domain.
✅ Use POP3 to pull email from other accounts.
✅ Or use a real email program to check all your accounts in one place.
This will help you get all your emails safely!
How to Get Rid of OneDrive on Your PC
By Leo Notenboom, Ask Leo!
OneDrive can be a useful tool once you’re familiar with it. However, Microsoft has made some decisions that make the service feel intrusive, confusing, and, in at least one case, downright problematic. As a result, many users simply want to remove it.
In this guide, I’ll walk you through how to effectively disable or completely remove OneDrive from your Windows PC.
Important Notes Before You Begin
Before we dive in, it’s essential to understand what these changes will do:
- They only affect the PC you’re using.
- Your OneDrive account and files in the cloud will remain intact and can still be accessed anytime at onedrive.com.
- No files will be deleted—either from your PC or from the cloud—unless you specifically choose to remove them.
- Backup recommended: As always, I recommend creating a full system image backup before making significant changes.
Step 1: The Simple Solution — Unlink OneDrive
This first method is often all you need to effectively “remove” OneDrive from your day-to-day use.
- Go to the OneDrive icon in your taskbar’s notification area.
- Right-click the icon and select Settings.
- In the settings window, go to the Account tab and click Unlink this PC.
- Confirm the action.
Once unlinked, OneDrive no longer knows which account to sync and stops interacting with your files or cloud storage. It’s essentially dormant.
Even though the program remains installed, it won’t affect your system unless you manually reconnect it. If you ever change your mind, you can re-enable OneDrive by signing in again and resyncing.
This approach is safe and reversible, and often the only step needed to “remove” OneDrive functionality.
Step 2: Uninstalling the OneDrive Application
If you prefer to go a step further and completely remove the OneDrive application:
- Open Settings > Apps > Installed apps.
- Locate Microsoft OneDrive in the list.
- Click the three-dot menu next to it and select Uninstall.
- Follow the prompts to complete the uninstallation.
If you ever decide to reinstall OneDrive, it’s available in the Microsoft Store.
Step 3: Check for Startup Entries
After uninstalling, it’s a good idea to verify that OneDrive isn’t set to start automatically:
- Press Ctrl + Shift + Esc to open Task Manager.
- Navigate to the Startup tab.
- Look for any OneDrive-related entries. If you find any, right-click and disable them.
If OneDrive is still listed here after uninstalling, it may not have been fully removed. You can disable the startup entry to ensure it doesn’t run.
Step 4: What About the OneDrive Folder?
Even after unlinking or uninstalling OneDrive, you may notice a folder named “OneDrive” still exists on your system. For example:
C:\Users\[YourUsername]\OneDrive
This is perfectly normal.
Uninstalling OneDrive does not delete any files or folders from your computer. The OneDrive folder becomes a regular folder—no syncing, no special behavior. You can treat it like any other folder:
- Leave it as is
- Move files out of it
- Delete individual files
- Delete the folder entirely
However, I recommend keeping the folder, especially if any shortcuts like Documents or Downloads are still pointing to locations inside the former OneDrive folder. These shortcuts may have been re-routed if you previously used OneDrive’s backup feature.
OneDrive-Free and Moving On
And that’s it! Whether you simply disabled it or removed it completely, OneDrive is now out of your way. You can continue using your PC without any background syncing or cloud integration—just local files under your control.
For more information, related articles, or to leave a comment, visit
askleo.com/166323
Leo Notenboom
[Ask Leo!](https://askleo.com)
