Having different email addresses is a norm today. Almost everyone does so! But juggling between different providers is not only time consuming, but also frustrating. The thing is that it has now become a necessary evil.
One work around is to use an email forwarding service that will route all mails from all email address to a single place. That place can be a person’s personal email address!
In this article on best email forwarding services, we are going to take a quick look into the options that you have. Some of the options mentioned here are free services, while other are paid.
Choose the one that suits you needs!
Before we take a deep dive into the blurs, let us quickly go through the topics that we will be covering in this writeup.
Here is what you are going to learn today:
- Best email forwarding services.
- What is email forwarding?
- Advantages of email forwarding.
- Disadvantages of email forwarding.
- General FAQ.
So, let us dig in!
Best Email Forwarding Services for 2024
If you are short on time, here is a quick list of the services that you will find here:
- Mailgun (Premium)
- Forward Email (Free and Premium)
- ForwardMX (Premium)
- ImprovMX (Free and Premium)
- Pobox (Premium)
- @EmailForward.mx (Premium)
- DuoCircle (Premium)
- Gmail (Free)
Now, if you have time, let us get started!
#1. Mailgun
Mailgun is transactional email service provider. This reliable provider allows setting up email forwarding and define routing rules.
With routing rules, you can prevent certain emails from getting into your destination email address.
For instance, you want the emails from the domain you own to land in your Gmail address. However, you do not want the pesky website development offers, or SEO offers to land in your Gmail inbox.
You can achieve that using routing rules that will filter out the spam.
While routing and filtering is one of the many things you can do, the core function of routing emails from your domain to your preferred destination is easy to set up.
Setting up Mailgun is easy, but do not think that you can do that with a flip of a switch. You must tinker around with DNS records and MX records to set things in motion.
If you are not wonderfully comfortable with those stuff, you can ask Mailgun support, or you can ask your hosting provider to assist you.
Doing things wrong will not harm your website or blog, but yes, not being able to setup email forwarding can be quite frustrating.
So, take your time! Remember, slow and steady wins the race.
Mailgun is the preferred email forwarding service for millions of people across the world.
Mailgun is not free. They have what they call the Flex plan under which you can enjoy 5,000 free emails every month for three months. That is not a free plan. That is a trial. Once the trial is over, you must pay a nominal charge starting at $0.80 per 1,000 emails.
However, the Flex plan is a basic plan, and you will not get to enjoy some of the advanced features of the service. If you want more, you must move to the Foundation plan or beyond that starts with $35 a month.
#2. Forward Email
Forward Email is one of the most reliable email forwarding services you can get today. It uses a freemium model. The free plan is quite interesting as it allows unlimited custom domain names, unlimited aliases, unlimited disposable email addresses, protection from virus, executable, and phishing, and more.
The catch is that the forwarding configuration can be accessed by anyone smart enough to use the terminal and find the configuration. That happens because the free plan uses public DNS records.
In case you want advanced protection, you can switch to their enhanced protection plan that costs only $3 per month. This plan forward, all your forwarding configurations are stored using a random string that the company generates cryptographically.
Forward Email charges for every account, and not every domain you add to a single account. So, you can add unlimited domains to a single account.
Setting up Forward Email is amazingly simple, but as always, some tinkering with DNS and MX records will be required. You just cannot skip that no matter which email forwarding service you are using.
The provider has some truly advanced settings that will keep you protected from online threats like viruses, executables, phishing attempts, and more.
What is interesting is that the company blatantly states that the prices they charge for different plans are never going to change, and that they are never going to shut down their services either.
Oh! They respect privacy! They do not track your activities. That is cool!
#3. ForwardMX
ForwardMX is a cheap service with their starter plan costing $60 a year. It allows up to 25 domains per account under this plan. If you have only one domain, you can choose their single domain plan that will cost you $24 a year.
Irrespective of the plan you select, you will get unlimited aliases, unlimited forwarded emails, and you can add unlimited team members.
However, their unlimited clause is subject to their fair usage policy, which is justified. After all, you should not be storing large files and backups, pirated content, etc. That is truly unfair.
They are a privacy focused company, and they will store your emails for only as long as it takes to forward them to the destination address. Once the emails are forwarded, they are deleted from their servers.
They also have a 30-day moneyback guarantee. So, if you are not happy with their services, you can ask for a refund.
#4. ImprovMX
Another simple and effective email forwarding service that you can rely on is ImprovMX. They offer a forever free plan under which you get to add only one domain and add only 25 aliases. For small projects, that should suffice.
For bigger organizations they have a premium and a business plan available that offer several features like priority support, emails sent via SMTP, priority deliver, 99% uptime SLA guarantee, etc.
The service is GDPR compliant, so you can rest assured that your privacy is not violated. Setting up ImprovMX is amazingly simple, and you can get started within minutes. The service will allow you to redirect your emails to any number of email address you want.
It even allows setting up ‘catch-all’ aliases so that you do not miss anything. You never know! Something can be important. The premium plan starts for $9 a month while the business plan will cost you $49 a month.
#5. Pobox
Pobox is a brilliant email forwarding service that you can rely on. They offer a free trial, and at the end of the trial, you must pay for their services. So, there are no forever free plans.
They have several interesting features, and one of them is the ability to set email filters that will prevent certain emails from reaching your inbox. They have a robust spam protection system in place that you can customize as per your needs and comfort level.
They have a fantastic email inbox as well. It is known as Mailstore, and it comes with 50GB storage capacity. Mailstore is accessible via webmail, IMAP, or POP.
The company offers their services at reasonable rates. If you opt for their Mailstore plan, it will cost you $50 a year. Depending on your needs, you can choose from other two plans called Pobox Plus that costs $35 a year, or Pobox Basic that will cost you $20 a year. These two options do not have the Mailstore inbox.
One of the downsides is that Pobox will allow you to forward your emails to only 5 destinations at once.
#6. @EmailForward.mx
Another popular email forwarding service for 2024 is @EmailForward.Mx. The company will charge you €20 a year (approximately $24.33).
Setup is quite simple. All you need to do is change MX records! That is all! You will start receiving emails.
The service will allow you to create ‘catch all’ aliases for your domain. There is a feature called Blackhole that will allow you to define the email aliases that do not forward.
The company does not limit the number of emails that can be forwarded. There is no limit on attachments, either. And the best part is that they allow all file types!
For enhanced security, the company offers a two-factor authentication features that will keep your account protected against unauthorized use.
New users have a 30-day moneyback guarantee. So, of you try the service, and if you are not happy, you can ask for a refund within 30 days from the date of purchase.
#7. DuoCircle
DuoCircle offers several types of email related services, and email forwarding is one of them. The service will allow you to create unlimited number of aliases, with each alias allowed to forward emails to 10 email addresses.
There is no limit to the number of messages that can be forwarded, and it works seamlessly with hosted emails like Office 365 and Gmail.
You can send forward groups, too! This will allow you to forward emails to multiple recipients at once. And it comes with protection against phishing, spam, and viruses.
DuoCircle is quite expensive, and its lowest plan starts for $32 for 3 months. They will charge $100, $180, and $242 for 1 year, 2 years, and 3 years, respectively.
#8. Gmail
Gmail needs no introduction. Possibly, you are using Gmail right now. Forwarding emails from Gmail is too simple. However, the downside is that you cannot setup a forwarding group, which means that you cannot forward emails to multiple people at once.
Gmail is completely free, but if you want to use Gmail for business, you need to purchase a subscription with Gmail Workspace. Setting up Gmail Workspace can be slightly confusing. So, if you are planning on using Gmail, go through their documentation properly.
Chances are, you will spend a lot of time searching for the setting!
Okay, now that you have the list, it is time to cover a few basic things. Let us start!
What is email forwarding?
Email forwarding is a method that you use for resending the emails from one email account to another.
Let us assume that you have 5 emails accounts, of which four are business emails, while the last one is your personal Gmail account.
You keep receiving emails in your business email address throughout the day. It is difficult to hop between four email accounts for the entire day.
What you can do is forward the emails you receive in your business email account to your Gmail account. This way, you will have all the emails in a single place.
Though the process sounds amazingly simple, what you are looking at is the final product – the surface. Underneath the polished surface is a complex system or a complex machinery of servers and networks that make this happen.
Advantages of email forwarding
- Email forwarding allows a business enterprise to concentrate all emails that it receives in a single place.
- Similarly, email forwarding also allows segmented distribution of received emails to specific recipients. For instances, incoming emails can be categorized as sales, finance, human resource, etc. and forwarded to people responsible for addressing each department.
- Email forwarding can prevent a particular email address from being flooded by emails.
- Email forwarding allows changing the email address of the recipients at any given point in time. This ensures that if an employee has left the organization, a separate email alias can be set for the replacement employee, thus ensuring that the person who left the organization does not receive the company emails.
Disadvantages of email forwarding
- There is always a risk that forwarded messages can be marked or flagged as spam messages, which means that you may not receive the emails. Changing the Mail Exchanger settings can help to get rid of this problem.
- There is something called ‘send as’ facility in email forwarding. Many shared mail servers flag such outgoing emails as spam. So, the intended recipient may never receive the emails.
- There is always a possibility of increased server load because of spam activities.
General FAQ
Yes, it is possible. There is a company called AnonAddy. The servers of this company can forward emails anonymously. However, if you are using email forwarding for professional purposes, anonymous email forwarding will damage your reputation.
No, Gmail will allow forwarding email to only one email address. You can set a group and send one email to multiple email addresses.
Exchange, Office 365, Rackspace Hosting, Zimbra, Google Workspace are all examples of hosted emails. There are some email forwarding services that work seamlessly with such hosted emails. DuoCircle is one such email forwarding service.
Conclusion
Email forwarding is an interesting concept, and it is quite popular. However, there are serious issues as well that you should be addressing. As mentioned earlier, some forwarded emails can be perceived as spams. This may force recipient or sender server to flag them.
Whether you need email forwarding services or not will depend on your organization’s goals and size. If your organization has only a couple of people (a startup, maybe), you will not require email forwarding.
So, just because email forwarding exists, it does not mean you have to use it! Use it depending on your needs.
