Hi, I'm Cyril and I run ImprovMX.com - an email forwarding tool - with my co-founder Antoine.
We discovered the Mailgun’s price change last week and noticed they dropped the “free email forwarding” options they had, now asking for $420/year for this feature.
We’ve seen a great increase in interest for email forwarding services and received a few questions via Twitter or as a comment in the Mailgun’s thread on HN.
So I’m happy to answer all the questions you might have, here.
We do our best to be as transparent as we can. We are aware that emails are a sensitive topic and user privacy is something important, even more today. I think that having an open discussion here on HN might alleviate some bias that some of you might have - at least that’s what I hope to accomplish here!
This is exactly what I was looking for! I wonder though: how can I trust you guys that you'll successfully manage to redirect all emails? Loosing emails is really bad.
Also I'm curious; how did you manage to land #1 on Google for the query "free email redirection service"?
Indeed, losing emails is really bad. We do our best to avoid this and try to be very reactive when things go south, but it's not possible to guarantee you that we will never lose any emails (no one can).
We acquired the service back in 2017. At the time, it was ranking already well for "free email redirection" so we focused on that. The core service is still free, but we added a lot of features (and continue to do so) in the paid "premium" parts.
Ok sounds good :-). I just registered with https://forwardemail.net/ instead though. Because they are older which makes me trust them more - that they won't close shop next week. Although the UX of improvmx seems much better. Thanks for the reply.
I wonder how you found out that Forwardemail is older. You made me curious so I checked and from the whois details, Forwardemail was registered on 10/2017 whereas ImprovMX was registered on 08/2013.
We've acquired ImprovMX in 2017 and greatly improved the service (from a single DO droplet to multiple powerful servers to handle thousands of emails per hours).
That's interesting that you thought it was older, it's worth taking notes of this.
I agree that the open-source part is the USP for ForwardEmail that we haven't. The thing on our end is that we have already thought about opensourcing a few parts of our service, but if we don't do all, it doesn't matter to do partially.
So instead, we plan to have an audit from an external service to guarantee that what we say and offer is aligned with the respect of our users and privacy. That's the next step :)
Yeah I remember visiting it before 2017. No offense, but before that it was a shady looking website. I tested it once and the drop rate was high, slow delivery time, etc.
Now its professional looking and I guess is an actual competitor to Mailgun. Glad youve turned it around.
Ahahah, none taken, that's why we redesigned it :)
Before changing their price, Mailgun was (my) target competitor, with the idea that if I can compete with them, we would be good as a company rather than a side project. Now, this seems more than possible with their new pricing!
This is great, just signed up for a free account and moved over from mailgun! It would be nice if you had a "lite" or "hobby" plan, something in-between free and ~$110/year. The free plan works for me but would like to support the projects I use.
Just signed up and been testing your service. Overall: it's excellent!
I prefer your server based approach over listing aliases in DNS TXT records. It's a slightly disconcerting feeling to list a private/personal email address somewhere anyone can see it.
I also like how the "from" field is correctly populated with the senders address, this hasn't been done neatly on previous services I tried.
Obviously I can't comment on deliverability, reliability and so on, but can't really fault the experience so far.
I agree that having your personal email in clear in a public DNS records is not great (and goes again the privacy statement), but I can also understand the appeal to the Open-source ideology :)
For information, we are discussing on our end about ways to improve our transparency and show our users that we are not storing any emails or selling them or anything like this. It's easy to say it on the landing page, but that's not proof.
Right now, we are thinking about hiring an audit firm to do that work and certify that our words are true, we think it's the best thing to do.
I think it's even better than open-sourcing our code because we could publish our code, crying out loud that we are open source, but still run an alternative version of our code on our server. You can't verify that. But an audit will clearly prove what's going on under the hood.
We have three core rules we like to follow:
1. An easy to use interface
2. A fast and awesome support
3. Respecting the users (or, the way I put it, be able to face myself in the mirror in the morning)
Never used this site before and can't figure out how to reply to your other comment. Nonetheless, I think having a tier betwen free and lite that allows 25mb attachments would be great for us casuals who have a few domains to manage and just want it all to forward to our main email. And don't need up to 100.
We discovered the Mailgun’s price change last week and noticed they dropped the “free email forwarding” options they had, now asking for $420/year for this feature.
We’ve seen a great increase in interest for email forwarding services and received a few questions via Twitter or as a comment in the Mailgun’s thread on HN.
So I’m happy to answer all the questions you might have, here.
We do our best to be as transparent as we can. We are aware that emails are a sensitive topic and user privacy is something important, even more today. I think that having an open discussion here on HN might alleviate some bias that some of you might have - at least that’s what I hope to accomplish here!