Setting up a CNAME record for any one of the domain addresses or subdomains you've got in the hosting account allows you to point it to a different domain/subdomain. The forwarded domain name will lose all its records - A, MX and so on, and will take the records of the domain name it is being directed to. In this light, you cannot create a CNAME record to forward your domain name to a third-party company and keep a working email service with the first provider. It's also very important to know that a CNAME record is always a string of words rather than a number as it is commonly confused with the A record of the domain address being forwarded. One of the primary uses of a CNAME record is to point a domain address that you own through one provider to the servers of some other provider if you have set up an Internet site with the latter. In this way, the site will appear under your own domain, not under some subdomain provided by the third-party provider.