Forwarding e-mail lets you use one e-mail address to send e-mail to another.  There are several reasons why someone might want to forward e-mail.  If you are screening e-mails, you can send them to one address from another to weed out people who contact you.  In order to forward email in Gmail, you need to have a Gmail e-mail address and another e-mail address.  You can use another Gmail account or you can have another e-mail service to use, such as Hotmail or Yahoo mail.

If you want to forward email in Gmail, you want to login to your Gmail e-mail account. Go to the Forwarding and POP tab then look for the Forwarding section, it will be at the top of the settings page. You want to enter in the forwarding address and enable forwarding. Save those settings and from that point on, your e-mail will be forwarded to the address you specified.

While on the same screen, you can also change how Gmail handles e-mail storage. You can either leave hard copies on the server or have Gmail delete them as they are forwarded. There are three options Gmail gives you: You can keep a copy in the Gmail inbox, you can archive the Gmail copy or you can trash the Gmail copy. If you trash the Gmail copy, it will be truly deleted after 30 days of storage.

If you find that forwarding email in Gmail is not right for you, you can always turn it off and return to using Gmail the regular way or utilize a third party client.  To turn it off, head back into your Forwarding and POP tab under Mail Settings and turn off the forwarding feature.  Save that setting and that will turn off the forward email in Gmail feature until you find a way to use your e-mail the way you want.