Creating a CNAME record for each of the domain addresses or subdomains that you have in a hosting account will enable you to point it to a different domain/subdomain. The forwarded Internet domain will lose all its records - A, MX and so on, and will take the records of the Internet domain it's being pointed to. In this light, you can't set up a CNAME record to forward your domain name to a third-party provider and keep a working email service with the first hosting company. It is also essential to know that a CNAME record is always a string of words and never a number as it is frequently wrongly identified as the A record of the domain address being redirected. One of the major uses of a CNAME record is to forward a domain name which you own through one provider to the servers of another company when you have set up a website with the latter. That way, the Internet site will appear under your own domain name, not under some subdomain provided by the third-party provider.