Mail Forwarding

Mail forwarding redirects an outgoing message to a single inbox instead of its real recipients. It replaces the recipients rather than copying them — there is no bcc or "copy" mode, so a forwarded message's original recipients receive nothing.

Applies in every environment, including production

Nothing in the forwarding path checks the environment. A tenant whose override is set to "Always forward" stops its real members from receiving any mail — in production, exactly as it would in staging. There is no safety net beyond the configuration itself.

Configuration

Forwarding has two levels: a platform-wide default, and a per-tenant override that wins over it.

Platform default

Open Settings → Mail (landlord admin) to configure the platform-wide default:

Field	Description
Forward all outgoing mail	The default used by any tenant that has not overridden it.
Forward to	The inbox used by tenants that have not set their own forward address.
Bypass addresses	One address per line. Recipients matching every entry are delivered normally instead of forwarded. Used by tenants that have not set their own list.

Tenant override

Open Tenants → <tenant> → Mail Forwarding to configure a specific tenant:

Field	Description
Forwarding	A three-way choice: use the platform default, always forward, or never forward.
Forward to	This tenant's forward address. Leave blank to use the platform address.
Bypass addresses	This tenant's bypass allowlist, which replaces the platform list. Leave blank to use the platform list.

Set the override from this screen rather than by writing the underlying mail_forward_override tenant setting directly. The three choices map to a stored boolean, or to no stored value at all for "use the platform default", and that distinction is what the mail path reads. A value written by hand through a generic settings command is stored as text, which is not the same thing.

Resolution

The tenant override wins whenever it is set to something other than "use the platform default":

Platform default	Tenant override	Result
Off	Use the platform default	Not forwarded
Off	Always forward	Forwarded
Off	Never forward	Not forwarded
On	Use the platform default	Forwarded
On	Always forward	Forwarded
On	Never forward	Not forwarded

Mail sent outside any tenant context — landlord notifications, for example — has no tenant override to read, so it follows the platform default and the platform address.

Choosing a forward address

The tenant's forward address wins whenever it is set. An empty tenant address falls back to the platform address rather than disabling forwarding — it means "use the platform address," not "don't forward." If neither the tenant nor the platform has an address configured, nothing is forwarded, even when forwarding is otherwise enabled.

Bypass addresses

A bypass allowlist is configured platform-wide under Settings → Mail, and each tenant may configure its own under Tenants → (tenant) → Mail Forwarding. A tenant's list replaces the platform list rather than adding to it, so a tenant can narrow the allowlist as well as widen it. A tenant that leaves its list empty uses the platform list.

Only the platform list can be emptied to mean "bypass nothing" — an empty tenant list means "use the platform list," the same way an empty tenant forward address does.

Entries are one per line and may be literal addresses or * wildcard patterns:

[email protected]
*@example.com
qa-*@example.com

A message is delivered normally only when every recipient (To, Cc, and Bcc) matches an entry on the list. A single recipient that doesn't match is enough to forward the whole message.

Both the message recipients and the bypass entries are normalized before they're compared:

• Addresses are lowercased.
• + sub-address tags are stripped, so [email protected] matches a bypass entry of [email protected].
• Gmail addresses are canonicalized further: dots in the local part are removed and googlemail.com is treated as an alias of gmail.com, so [email protected] matches a bypass entry of [email protected]. This applies only to gmail.com and googlemail.com addresses.

What a forwarded message looks like

When a message is forwarded, its Cc and Bcc recipients are cleared and the original recipients are surfaced three ways so they're easy to spot in a shared forwarding inbox:

• Subject prefix — the subject is prefixed with the original recipients in brackets, for example [[email protected]] Your magic link.
• Body banner — a Forwarded — originally to: … banner is prepended to the message body.
• X-Original-To header — the original recipients are also preserved in an X-Original-To header.

The original recipients are shown exactly as they were addressed — the normalization described above is used only for bypass matching, not for these labels.