Creating a CNAME record for any of the domain addresses or subdomains that you've got in the hosting account will permit you to direct it to a different domain/subdomain. The forwarded domain will lose all of its records - A, MX and so forth, and will take the records of the domain address it's being pointed to. In this light, you cannot create a CNAME record to point your domain name to a third-party company and keep a working e-mail service with the first hosting provider. Also, it is very important to know that a CNAME record is always a string of words rather than a number as it's often wrongly identified as the A record of the Internet domain being redirected. One of the major uses of a CNAME record is to forward a domain that you own through one provider to the servers of some other provider if you have created a website with the latter. By doing this, the website will appear under your own domain address, not under some subdomain provided by the third-party company.