Creating a CNAME record for any one of the domain addresses or subdomains you have within a hosting account will permit you to direct it to a different domain/subdomain. The forwarded domain address will lose all its records - A, MX and so forth, and will take the records of the Internet domain it's being pointed to. In this light, you can't create a CNAME record to direct your domain to a third-party provider and retain 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 and never a number because it is frequently wrongly identified as the A record of the Internet domain being redirected. One of the primary uses of a CNAME record is to forward a domain which you own through one provider to the servers of another company assuming you have set up an Internet site with the latter. This way, the site will appear under your own domain, not under some subdomain provided by the third-party company.