Setting up a CNAME record for any of the domain names or subdomains that you have in the hosting account will allow you to point it to a different domain/subdomain. The forwarded domain address will lose all its records - A, MX and so on, and will take the records of the domain it is being redirected to. In this light, you cannot create a CNAME record to forward your domain to a third-party provider and keep a functional e-mail service with the first hosting provider. Additionally, it is essential to know that a CNAME record is always a string of words rather than a number because it is regularly wrongly identified as the A record of the domain name being redirected. One of the primary uses of a CNAME record is to point a domain you own through one provider to the servers of another provider in case you have created an Internet site with the latter. In this way, the website will appear under your own domain, not under some subdomain provided by the third-party company.