What (in simple language) is URL forewarding and Email forewarding?

Answer 1

Say you registered a few domain names (website). For example you might register google.com, gogle.com,googol.com. The idea being that if someone misspells your address it will still take them to the same website. The way you do that is by URL forwarding in which you take your googol.com and gogle.com and redirect them to google.com (your central server).
Email Forwarding is when you want to transfer emails from an old account to a new one. You do this by taking a program which receives messages at one account (say [e-mail]) and transfers them to another account (say [e-mail]). That's the gist of the whole thing.

Answer 2

Okay, put fairly simply:

URL forwarding:

A 'URL' or Uniform Resource Locator is an english-esque address understandable to humans (IE, answers.yahoo.com). It's also linked to an IP (Internet Protocol) address like 192.168.0.201 (which is what the computers understand).

There are also things called DNS servers or Domain Name Servers. They help to convert between the human-understandable URLs (or domain names, like yahoo.com, google.com, etc.) and the machine understandable IP address (255.255.255.0). Basically when a user requests his machine to go find an address it sends the URL to the DNS server, which then gives the user's machine the physical IP address. They connect up, and the user is 'served' whatever page resides at that address/folder/subfolder, etc.

URL forwarding basically is a method of having several different URL's people understand all point to the same IP or physical address.

So, maybe they'll register common typos so they all point to the same physical address. So maybe you'll have answres.yahoo.com and asnwers.yahoo.com and naswers.yahoo.come all still forwarded to the correct physical IP address.

However, some scammers use this technique to register similar URL's to popular ones and point them to the scammer's server (like maybe goggle.com instead of google, or yahhoo.com instead of yahoo). So you want to be sure to type URL's correctly or you might get sent to a "spoof" or "phishing" site where they're hosted on the scammer's own server and looks like the legit site but isn't, and may ask you for passwords, personal info (address, SSN, credit card #'s) or whatever else so they can commit fraud against you.

E-mail forwarding, on he other hand is a nice feature you can usually set up with your internet service provider such that you can have your e-mail sent from one address you own to another.

IE, I could have [e-mail] and [e-mail] all forwarded to my real e-mail address at [e-mail] (imaginary example, I wouldn't use my real addresses on here) and then just have one point of access for all my incoming e-mail from different e-mail addresses. So, if I don't want to give out my personal e-mail address to sites I don't trust, I can set up a fake e-mail at mgmirkin!shablahblah.com and have them forward it to my real e-mail. If someone sells that address to a scammer or a phisher and I start getting junkmail, I can cancel my fake e-mail, and create a new one and have THAT one forwarded to my real one so Iget less junk mail again.

woohoo! are you as exhausted as I am?

Answer 3

I don't know the technical answer. In plain english, anything sent to the 'forwarded' address is automatically transfered to another address.