Review of ForwardEmail.net

I started using ForwardEmail a long time ago, when its name made sense: it forwarded email. Set it to accept incoming email for your domain, and you could get it to forward email to wherever you read it.

These days, ForwardEmail doesn’t just forward email; it also has full email itself - IMAP/POP3/SMTP accounts, even a CALDAV account for a calendar - and it’s still remarkably cheap, at US$36 for the year. For that, you get virtually unlimited incoming domains, unlimited email aliases, and 10GB of space.

Ideal for power users

It’s the ideal thing for email power users, in many different ways:

• You can set email to come in via a webhook - so you can have your own web server accepting email on your behalf and doing things with it. (For a while, if you emailed me a press release but didn’t subscribe to the newsletter that the press release would be in, I would automatically respond suggesting that you might want to subscribe). The webhook functionality is even more useful now, after I asked for a new feature (to drop enclosures), so it’s no longer trying to send large enclosures to a webserver that can’t deal with them.
• You can set email to come in using a regular expression. I used this for an article called Podcasting’s Biggest Spammer, running analysis on where the spam messages were coming from.
• You can filter email based on rudimentary anti-spam and anti-malware filters.
• It is very privacy-conscious: it doesn’t store forwarded email, and if you use its mail accounts yourself, it’s encrypted at rest (by ForwardEmail, but probably not on your own machine).
• ForwardEmail supports proper mail rewriting - SRS, and DMARC, and SPF, and all the tediousness that current email needs. And so it should all work pretty well.

Probably not ideal for non-power users

After eight years of running a newsletter, I’m quite aware that email is not a simple set-up-and-go system.

ForwardEmail has a free mail-forwarding service (which I’d not really recommend), and an entirely different paid-for service; and the docs are a bit confusing for a new user as to what it talks about.

Using ForwardEmail (which, as we’ve already established above, doesn’t just forward email) means a lot of head-scratching and arcane DNS settings, and while they’ve worked to make it a little better in recent years, it’s still deeply confusing. The FAQ is pages and pages long, and you really need to know what you’re looking for.

Email forwarding doesn’t always work as you’d expect

So, if you send an email as mark@example.com to me, it’ll come into ForwardEmail at my own domain, and Forward email then forwards it from acomplicatedemailaddress@forwardemail.net to my “real” email account, which, let’s say, is example@hotmail.com.

So, that’s all fine. Except, of course, if in Hotmail I report spam, it’ll be ForwardEmail that gets reported, not Example.com. “Please do not report the message as spam”, says ForwardEmail hopefully, in question number 86 on the FAQ, where nobody will notice.

And if Hotmail rejects the message, then I think the bounce goes back through ForwardEmail to the sender, but the rejection might be a rejection of forwardemail’s email rather than the sender’s email.

In the last few weeks, Gmail has been bouncing back forwarded emails, complaining about the SPF settings. Looking into the error messages, which are unclearly written (talking about “the domain”, rather than making it clear if it’s the sender’s domain or not), it’s hard to know where the error actually is. But I was in the position of having people tell me that their email was getting bounced, which isn’t ideal.

I did send a message to ForwardEmail support, but got no response. That’s disappointing.

There are no support forums or anything for ForwardEmail. You’re kind of on your own.

How I tried to use ForwardEmail, and the bad state of IMAP

I’ve used Gmail forever - most recently, using the excellent Mimestream as a paid-for desktop client for email. It’s really, really good - with the proviso that it’s pushing all my email into Gmail, and thus, privacy.

But, after Gmail kicked up errors when having email forwarded to it, I reckoned that the right way to use ForwardEmail was, oddly, not to actually use it to forward emails: but to wrestle my email away from Gmail altogether, and use a proper IMAP mail program to read my email.

So I put my incoming email into ForwardEmail’s IMAP accounts, and went on the hunt for a decent email program for the Mac and iPhone. While Apple Mail on iPhone is perfectly good, the Mac is a different question.

Apple Mail kind of worked. It uses different keystrokes to send mail, etc, than Gmail/Mimestream; and it has an annoying habit of turning a URL in a message into a big preview link, which I do not want it to do thank you, and when replying to an email, the dumb “Apple Intelligence” inserts itself in a way that doesn’t let me type without ESCaping it away, no thank you again. But Apple Mail also didn’t work. If you put a piece of mail into a subfolder (I use folders of “Monday”, “Tuesday”, “Wednesday” etc to schedule stories) then archiving or deleting email from those subfolders works about 25% of the time, but the remaining 75% of the time, the email reappears randomly within a few minutes. It’s very, deeply, frustrating. The workaround was to reply to the email, then pick up my phone and delete it from there using Apple Mail on iPhone, which does work. Arg.

I tried Thunderbird, but while that kind of worked technically, it was like going back to 1998 in terms of a user-interface. Everything looked bad, buttons weren’t in a sensible place, and it wasn’t for me.

Mailspring was too slow (a few seconds to slowly delete a message isn’t for me); I even considered Outlook, but that wanted to take copies of all my email, as did Spark; Edison Mail sells data from my email (anonymised) to its partners (no thanks); so I was beginning to struggle a bit.

Not just that - I was beginning to feel a bit stressed about the amount of email I was deleting. That electricity bill? I might want that in the future. Gmail’s hefty storage space (I pay for more of that anyway), and its decent search, is a good thing.

And, the amount of spam I was having to wade through was astonishing. Gmail has done an excellent job of hiding all the spam from me, I discover.

And then this morning, it hit me how to use ForwardEmail. Don’t forward the email.

How my setup works now

Email comes into ForwardEmail.

It stays there, temporarily, in an IMAP/POP3 account.

Gmail pulls new emails from POP3 (and can remove emails when it does so).

This lets Gmail see all the emails, but the spam filtering won’t be put off by ForwardEmail’s forward of the email; and there shouldn’t be any error messages sent to those who are emailing me. And I still get to use ForwardEmail’s webhooks, which I think give some interesting opportunities for the future.

In conclusion

ForwardEmail is a good cheap service: but for a proper power user. Don’t go expecting any support. Get ready to get your hands dirty in SPF, DKIM and DMARC.

If I were running ForwardEmail, I’d a) change its name; b) open a support forum asap; c) rewrite and simplify the “big FAQ section of doom”.