Yes, you can.  There are three ways to do this:

1. We can forward your incoming emails to your gmail mailbox.  They arrive within seconds, but when you reply the reply will come from your gmail address not your hosted domain address.  We can do this for hotmail, yahoo, or any other email service.
2. You can get gmail to fetch the messages from your hosted POP3 mailbox using the mail fetcher function in gmail.  You can set gmail up to reply from your hosted account as well using this system.  You do not need to contact us to do this – simply follow the instructions for setting up the gmail fetcher.
3. You can move your domain to google apps.  This means that we no longer control your email traffic and any new accounts or forwarders must be setup through google apps.  But this can be a very elegant solution.  To do this, setup your google apps account first, then contact support to send the MX traffic to gmail.

An email mailbox is an actual mailbox on the server.  It’s like a letterbox outside your house that mail gets dropped into.  It sits in the mailbox until you come along and collect it – and if you forget to check it, it will pile up until it gets full and mail delivery is terminated.  You can collect mail using mail programs such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Mac Mail, Thunderbird, etc.  You will need to set up your mail programme to access the mail box using POP3 or IMAP protocol.  We provide generic instructions on how to do this when we set up a mailbox.  Usually, when you receive an email through a mailbox and reply to it the reply will come from your hosted email address.

An email forwarder simply redirects mail sent to one email address to another email address.  It does not need an actual mailbox on the server (although you can do both forwarding and have a mailbox with the same name).  For example, if we host yourdomain.co.nz, we can forward email sent to jack@yourdomain.co.nz to any email address in the world, maybe jill@yourdomain.co.nz or jackandjill@gmail.com. Once the email arrives in your other mailbox you can read it as normal.  But if you reply, the reply will come from secondary mailbox, not the hosted domain mailbox.

We can also setup a default forwarder.  This means that if someone sends an address to john@yourdomain.co.nz (and there is no mailbox with that name) it will automatically be forwarded to jack@yourdomain.co.nz (or any other email address).  By default we don’t do this as you will most likely get more spam this way.