Creating a CNAME record for any one of the domain addresses or subdomains you have within a hosting account will allow you to point it to a different domain/subdomain. The forwarded domain address will lose all of its records - A, MX and so forth, and will take the records of the Internet domain it is being pointed to. In this light, you cannot set up a CNAME record to redirect your domain name to a third-party provider and maintain a functional e-mail service with the first hosting provider. It's also important to note that a CNAME record is always a string of words and never a number because it is regularly mistaken for the A record of the Internet domain being forwarded. One of the major uses of a CNAME record is to point a domain address which you own through one provider to the servers of another provider if you have created an Internet site with the latter. By doing this, the site will appear under your own domain name, not under some subdomain provided by the third-party company.