Show HN: Improvmx.com – An alternative to Mailgun for free email forwarding

by cx42net • 6 years ago

7 16 6 years ago

cx42net8• 6 years ago

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!

brillout4• 6 years ago

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"?

cx42net8• 6 years ago

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 :)

edsimpson• 6 years ago

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.

cx42net8• 6 years ago

Thank you. We're open to suggestions in terms of pricing (believe me, we spent quite some time arguing about the pricing and what to includes :) ).

What is missing for you in the free plan that you would be willing to pay for (but less than $110/year)?

(Note that the premium plan is at $90 if you pay yearly).

Thank you in advance :)

tmrduk• 6 years ago

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.

cx42net8• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

Show HN: Improvmx.com – An alternative to Mailgun for free email forwarding

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