Emails redirecting

Question

I believe that my business partner is redirecting emails that we are receiving from our websites to his personal email accounts.

We would receive an inquiry and then it would disappear after a few seconds.

He clearly is using the subject line as the trigger for this redirection rule. When I changed it to test the theory it did not disappear, when I switched it back it disappeared again.

Now I have checked our cPanel backend (to what i am able to see), he is not redirecting it with any rule or setting there (he also doesnt have access to this).

I believe he has setup his email client on his laptop (eM Client or possibly Outlook) to filter and redirect/forward these enquiries.

So my questions are:

1. Is there a way to stop 3rd party applications from redirecting emails?

2. Is it at all possible to track and get proof that he is doing this? Anyway of seeing/tracing the email to see at which address it lands in the end?

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

If Outlook is being used to forward messages from your servers to another account, then no, your server cannot control that, as it is at the client end. Any email forwarding performed at the client end (that uses a third party email server to forward the message), assuming that you are using the standard POP3 or IMAP protocols for email, cannot be controlled at the server end.

However, you should be able to see in the server logs if several things have been done:

1. If the message was moved on the server from the inbox to deleted messages.
2. If the message was deleted permanently on the server.
3. If the message was forwarded to another address by using your server to do the actual forwarding.

Again, if this is done on the client ONLY then you won't be able to stop it, but another way you might mitigate this is to do the following: 1. Update the web site to have a new email address for inquiries. 2. Create the new email account, one without access by the business partner. 3. Have CPanel rules set up to send a copy of these inquiries to the original email box.

This way, you would still get a copy of the inquiries, and you could then compare the two email accounts for evidence.