A domain name is much more important than most of us realize. An older name will do better in the search engines that a new one. So heaven forbid you ever get rid of that old name.

Aliasing is a property of an account.  Deleting the account will let the aliasing gone. An alias is a way to give an account another local name. For example, abc@domain.com may be known as xyz@domain.com (note the same domain name).

With a forwarder you can map local account name to some remote account. For example, mail for abc@domain.com can be forwarded to xyz@my.domain.com (account in another domain, or even, server.). Forwarders are separate, so if you even delete the account, the forwarder stays.

Which you prefer is a question of how you want to govern it.  For example, if you had a e-mail address representing an organizational role that might be re-assigned regularly to different members of staff, then you should use a Forwarder because you only need to change the Forwarder object (otherwise you'd need to remove the alias from one account and add it to another).

On the other hand, if the e-mail address is specific to this user and should stay/go with them, use an alias. Since groups can't have aliases, you need Forwarders to assign extra names to groups.

How forwarding works?... The web server uses Host Headers to bind your alias to the primary site. The binding occurs at the root level, and you can only 'point' your secondary domain to the root folder of your primary website. Pointing your domain name alias to a specified sub-directory on your primary site is not supported.

If you wish to redirect incoming URL's to domain-specific sub-directories, you can do so through the use of a few lines of ASP script, which is placed at the top of your default home page. ASP provides you with the host header property used to access the site, and a means of redirecting a page hit to another URL. You can use these features to examine the host header originally used to get to your site, and then redirect the user to the appropriate place.

Four different methods of domain forwarding:

• URL Forwarding: User is forwarded to your website directly.
• Forwarding with Navigation Bar: This bar will be appear on the bottom of your page.
• Forwarding with pop-up windows: It will be accomplished by the pop-up window, which you can close.
• Forwarding with ad page: Viewer is first directed to page before accessing your website.

Now, opportunity is yours to acquire new brandable name while not loosing the benefits of an aged domain name.