Guide
How email forwarding works
Email forwarding sounds like magic and works like plumbing. Here's the journey of a message through a forwarding alias — and why the sender never learns where it ends up.
Someone emails your alias
A store, a subscriber, a sponsor — they send to yourname@vend.email like any normal address. As far as their mail server is concerned, it is a normal address.
Vend receives it and checks your rules
Is the alias active or paused? Is the sender on your blocked or safe list? Spam gets filtered, unwanted senders are stopped, and your folders and tags are applied.
The message lands in your real inbox
Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, Proton — wherever you already read mail. The forwarding destination is known only to you; the sender sees nothing but the alias.
You reply — privately
Hit reply and Vend routes your response back out through the alias. The recipient sees the alias in the From field, never your personal address. You can also compose brand-new messages from an alias.
Why this beats filters and folders alone
Inbox filters sort mail after your address is already out there. Forwarding aliases work one step earlier: each sender gets a different address, so control lives at the source. Pause one alias and one relationship goes quiet. Your filters never see the mail because it never arrives.
And the Vend twist: the destination can change owners
Because the alias sits between sender and inbox, pointing it at a different inbox is trivial — and that's what makes a Vend alias transferable. Sell a project, hand over a community, or sell the address itself: the new owner accepts, forwarding switches to their inbox, and the address keeps working without a blip.