Creating a CNAME record for any one of the domain addresses or subdomains you've got in the hosting account allows you to forward it to a different domain/subdomain. The forwarded domain name will lose all of its records - A, MX etc, and will take the records of the domain it is being directed to. In this light, you can't create a CNAME record to forward your domain name to a third-party provider and maintain a working email service with the first provider. Additionally, it is essential to know that a CNAME record is always a string of words and not a number as it's generally mistaken for the A record of the domain being forwarded. One of the main uses of a CNAME record is to direct a domain that you own through one provider to the servers of another company assuming you have set up a website with the latter. In this way, the site will appear under your own domain name, not under some subdomain provided by the third-party company.
CNAME Records in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The Hepsia hosting Control Panel, which comes with each of our semi-dedicated server accounts, will enable you to set up a CNAME record with ease. When you want to create a private URL for your e-mails, to redirect a domain to a subdomain within the account or to forward a domain name to another provider and use some third-party service which they provide, it won't take you more than three clicks to set up such a record. All DNS records for the domains and subdomains hosted inside the semi-dedicated account are going to be listed in a separate section in the Control Panel, so when you are there, all that you will have to do will be to select the type of the record that you want to set up and the hostname for which you are creating it, and then input the actual record text. For your benefit, you can see a short video within the CP concerning how to set up a CNAME record or you can follow the instructions in the help article, that is available in the DNS records section.