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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 th

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 7y 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"?
- cx42net 7y 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 :)
  - brillout 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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 7y ago
        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 7y ago
        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 :)
      - brillout 7y ago
        For me it's all about trust; if you can somehow increase trust you'd win folks like me over. E.g. saying "if we shut down we'll notify you one week prior".
        cx42net 7y ago
        That's a good point! I'll take note of that, thank you.
  - IceWreck 7y ago
    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.
    - cx42net 7y ago
      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!
edsimpson 7y 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.
- cx42net 7y 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 :)

brillout 7y 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"?

cx42net 7y 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 :)
- brillout 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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 7y ago
        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 :)
    - brillout 7y ago
      For me it's all about trust; if you can somehow increase trust you'd win folks like me over. E.g. saying "if we shut down we'll notify you one week prior".
      - cx42net 7y ago
        That's a good point! I'll take note of that, thank you.
- IceWreck 7y ago
  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.
  - cx42net 7y ago
    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!

edsimpson 7y 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.

cx42net 7y 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 :)