I purchased a domain that came with free services like email forwarding. I would like to take advantage of this service but since I changed the DNS to my host's nameservers, those services became unavailable. As far as I can tell, the only option I have is to change DNS back to domain nameservers and do URL forwarding. How does Google and yahoo react to url forwarding? Isn't it better to have nameservers of your actual host, so that when your site gets crawled there is no confusion with your real domain and your subdomain?
It doesn't matter where your name servers are at. Microsoft's name servers aren't within the microsoft.com domain for example.
point your domain's MX record to your registar's email server and it's CNAME record to your host's DNS.
The MX record for your domain can point to any mail server you want to use. Here's how it will look when you are done (MX and A are types of DNS records - your hosting company will know): Registrar's Name Server: [NS] my-domain-name -> my-name-server-ip-address Your Name Server @ my-name-server-ip-address: [MX] mail.any-domain-name [A] mail.any-domain-name -> mail-server-ip-address [optional] Note that any-domain-name can be literally any domain name, not just yours (in case if you want some other company to host your mail server). If any-domain-name is actually your domain, then you need that A record as well. J.D.