
Show HN: Improvmx.com – An alternative to Mailgun for free email forwarding - cx42net
https://improvmx.com
======
cx42net
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!

~~~
brillout
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"?

~~~
cx42net
Thank you!

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.

I hope I have answered your questions :)

~~~
brillout
Ok sounds good :-). I just registered with
[https://forwardemail.net/](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.

~~~
cx42net
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).

~~~
brillout
It was guesstimate. It "looks" older and more indie whereas improvmx looks
more startup-ish. It also increases trust that the code is open source.

Actually the forwarding doesn't seem to work so I may switch over to you guys
:-).

~~~
cx42net
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 :)

------
tmrduk
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.

~~~
cx42net
Hi and thank you for your warm words!

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)

~~~
yeetmyfeet
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.

