Review: ImprovMX email forwarding service

Back in June, I reviewed ForwardEmail, which is an email forwarding service but is now, also, an email hosting service of its very own.

Two people reached out:

• The founder of ForwardEmail, who noted my review and offered to help further
• The CEO of ImprovMX, who also noted my review and was keen to offer me free access to ImprovMX

Given I wasn’t entirely happy with ForwardEmail, and that my $36/year’s subscription was coming up, I accepted the free account at ImprovMX, and said I’d write it up. Matthew at ImprovMX responded: “Would LOVE an honest writeup. Though you’d have to add a disclaimer to the top of the blog post disclosing bias that ImprovMX nicely gave you a free unlimited account :)”

Ideal for email forwarding

The UX to use ImprovMX is very clean and easy to use - there’s no steep learning curve here, which is nice. If all you want is to forward emails from one domain to another, it’s very easy to learn - much easier than the competition.

Adding a domain is relatively simple, too, with very clear instructions on what to do. Considerable time and effort has been spent making this simple and understandable.

If you’d like to send emails, you can too - with SMTP credentials available for every paid user. I send all outgoing email using Amazon SES, so I don’t use this bit, but nice to know it exists.

Uniquely, you can set rules if you prefer; so if you want to, you can do some quite detailed mail sorting. I guess this could be useful for some users.

You can also see full logs for the last seven days. That’s useful for seeing what came in and where it went; and it stores the full email text and the errors it saw along the way, if any. The logs are clear(ish) when errors are sent back to people who are trying to email you, and what the errors are.

And if you want an email to just be a webhook and touch your webserver instead, then that’s doable here, too.

For email forwarding, it does a great, clear job. Paid plans start at $9 a month ($90 a year), though you can find a cheaper “light plan” if you look carefully on the pricing page.

If all you’re looking for is a decent, reliable, email forwarding system, then I’d absolutely recommend ImprovMX. It’s as easy to understand as is possible; and is very nicely done.

Let’s talk about spam

ImprovMX has a spam filter, which is on by default for all customers. It appears to be a tuned SpamAssassin instance.

This is a good thing, I’m told, because if you just blindly forward all email, including email you know is spam, then eventually your service will be marked down as sending spam. Although, ARC is supposed to mitigate this; and ImprovMX supports that.

And, since we’re talking about spam, let’s talk about support.

Support

ImprovMX has been almost rock solid at forwarding emails - apart from one time, when a contact told me that their email to me had bounced. It was bounced as spam. But something odd had happened - it got a mark of exactly zero in the spam scoring, but still got bounced as being spam.

I emailed support with the message. A chummy, over-familiar AI assistant responded, cheerfully agreeing with me that the spam checker had a fault. After a to and fro with the AI assistant, it escalated the email to a human being, who entirely disagreed with the AI assistant, said it didn’t have a fault, and then told me that the reason it was bounced was…

the message was sent as a multipart email with both plain text and HTML.

He sent a screenshot of the multipart piece of email, highlighting “Content-Type: text/html” in colour, to make his point.

This was alarming. Almost every email on the planet is a multipart email with both plain text and HTML. The human on support seems not to know how email worked (and certainly not how ImprovMX actually checks for spam, which is written up on the website in very good detail).

Ultimately, I’d like the people who handle my email to be a) human, and b) specialists in email. This podcast with the CEO says ImprovMX is a recent acquisition as “a lifestyle business” by the current owner; he has a solid background in reliable systems, and is a nice, personable chap based on his emails, but he didn’t buy ImprovMX because he was passionate about email.

So, what next?

ImprovMX works well. It’s easy to set up, it seems to work relatively flawlessly, and I depend on it for my business. You can set it up and forget it. Again, I recommend it.

It’s not open-source (but I don’t, actually, mind too much about that). It doesn’t offer email accounts (but, again, I don’t care about that bit too). It works well.

But.

I can’t help look wistfully at ForwardEmail, who I used to use. ImprovMX has a page comparing the two companies, and I agree with every single word - ForwardEmail is historically bad at support, and its FAQ page is just the worst, clunkiest, most deeply technically-complex thing you’ve ever seen. (I notice that my blog about ForwardEmail is cited as evidence about ForwardEmail’s bad support).

However, ForwardEmail is run by techies. They appear to be continually coding and improving. They wrote their own spam scanner, but also their own DNS resolver, Caldav tool, uptime monitor, and more. They don’t just support things like ARC, above, but they’ve actively worked with the people who wrote the specification. They’ve added incoming logs, deliverability logs, and plenty more tools.

Their page on X - which I wish was a blog, or at least mirrored on the fediverse where their customers actually are - highlights that they’ve just put live a brand new version of their service, and made 56 releases in 2024. They’ve just switched to their own bare-metal servers. The service is more reliable now, they say, with a host of new tests. They post passionate blasts about PayPal’s rubbishness. They write 66 page technical whitepapers. A look at their incomprehensible Matrix server suggests that they’re responding well to user feedback there, and writing code and fixes.

ImprovMX is nice. It’s polished. It works well. I’m grateful for the opportunity to give it a go.

But if I’m paying for email (and I don’t like running my business on freebies), then I think I prefer the knowledge, the scrappiness - and the passion - of ForwardEmail.