Creating a CNAME record for any one of the domains or subdomains that you have in the hosting account allows you to redirect 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 address it is being redirected to. In this light, you cannot create a CNAME record to direct your domain name to a third-party provider and keep a working e-mail service with the first hosting company. Additionally, it is very important to know that a CNAME record is always a string of words and not a number as it is commonly wrongly identified as the A record of the domain being redirected. One of the main uses of a CNAME record is to forward a domain name which you own through one company to the servers of another provider when you have set up an Internet site with the latter. By doing this, the website will appear under your own domain name, not under some subdomain provided by the third-party company.