10 Best Email Forwarding Services in 2026 (Free, Paid & the Catch)

If your domain is on Cloudflare (or you are willing to move its DNS there), this is the best free forwarding, full stop. Create custom addresses, route them to any inbox, with no volume limits and no cost.

Setup is a few clicks and Cloudflare writes the MX and SPF records for you. It is genuinely free with no catch on volume, which is rare. Two honest limits though: it only receives, so you cannot send or reply as the address, and it requires your domain's DNS to live on Cloudflare, a non-starter if you cannot move it.

The honest catch: Receive-only, and DNS-locked to Cloudflare. To reply from your address you will need one of the paid options below, or a real mailbox.

ImprovMX is the default custom-domain forwarder most people land on, and for good reason: add a domain, point two DNS records at it, and you are forwarding in minutes, on any domain registrar.

The free tier covers one domain, 25 aliases and up to 500 forwards a day, plenty for a personal domain, and it does catch-all and webhooks too. To actually send and reply from your custom address you need the Premium plan ($9/mo), which adds outbound SMTP at around 6,000 emails a month.

The honest catch: Free is receive-only and capped at 500 forwards a day. Sending as your address is a paid feature. For light use the free tier is fine; to reply, budget for Premium.

Forward Email is the open-source pick: fully open-source, privacy-focused, and free for unlimited domains and aliases. If you want forwarding you can audit or self-host, this is it.

The free tier forwards from as many custom domains as you like, with no per-domain fee, which beats almost everyone. It is run by a small independent team and leans hard into privacy, with no logging. Outbound sending (SMTP and IMAP, so you can reply as your address) is the paid Enhanced plan, from about $3 a month.

The honest catch: The free tier is forward-only; sending needs the paid plan. As a smaller independent service it lacks the brand weight of Cloudflare or Proton, but the open-source transparency is the trade-off.

ForwardMX keeps it deliberately simple: paid plans that forward email for anywhere from one domain to thirty or more, into a central inbox, with catch-all and forwarding to multiple recipients.

There is no free tier. Pricing is tiered: from $30 a year for a single domain up to a $6-a-month plan (billed yearly) that covers 30 domains, far more than ImprovMX's free or entry plans, so it suits someone juggling a portfolio of domains or side projects. It can also send a copy of each message to up to 20 inboxes at once.

The honest catch: No free option, so it only makes sense once you have several domains to forward. For a single domain, the free tiers above are better value.

SimpleLogin, owned by Proton, is the alias tool I recommend most. Instead of forwarding a whole domain, it gives you throwaway addresses, one per website, that forward to your real inbox and can be switched off the moment one starts getting spam.

The standout: you can reply from an alias even on the free plan (starting a brand-new email from an alias needs Premium), which most forwarders charge for. Free covers 10 aliases; Premium ($4/mo, $36/yr) unlocks unlimited aliases, your own custom domain and catch-all, and now bundles Proton Pass. It is open-source and based in Switzerland.

The honest catch: The free tier caps you at 10 aliases, and a custom domain needs Premium. For pure domain forwarding it is the wrong shape; for privacy aliases it is the best on this list.

addy.io (formerly AnonAddy) is the budget, open-source alternative to SimpleLogin. It creates a different forwarding alias for every website, so you share an alias instead of your real address and kill it if it leaks.

Its free tier is generous, unlimited standard aliases that forward to your inbox, where SimpleLogin caps free at 10. Replying and sending from an alias sits on the cheap paid tiers (Lite around $1, Pro around $3 to $4 a month), which add a custom domain and unlimited everything. It is fully open-source and self-hostable.

The honest catch: Sending from an alias and using your own domain need a paid tier, though they are among the cheapest here. The free tier is forward-only.

When you actually need to send and receive properly from your custom address, not just forward it, the cheapest real mailbox is Zoho Mail. Its Forever Free plan hosts email for one domain and up to five users.

This is a full mailbox, so you reply, send and store mail as your domain address with no workarounds. The catch on free is webmail only, with no IMAP or POP, so you use Zoho's app or web client rather than Outlook or Apple Mail. The $1/user/month Lite plan (billed yearly) adds IMAP and more storage, and it is ad-free even on free.

The honest catch: Free has no IMAP/POP (webmail and the Zoho app only) and is limited to five users. It is a mailbox to run, not a forwarder to set and forget, but it is the cheapest way to truly own your domain email.

Fastmail is the premium, no-fuss mailbox: fast, private, excellent apps, and first-class custom-domain support with send-as and its own masked-email aliases built in. It also absorbed Pobox, so if an old list points you there, this is where it lands now.

There is no permanent free tier (a 30-day trial), and pricing starts around $5 a month (billed yearly), but you get a real, independent mailbox with proper IMAP, calendars and unlimited aliases on your domain. For someone who wants one paid home for their domain email and never wants to think about it again, it is the easy pick.

The honest catch: It is paid-only after the trial. If you just need free forwarding, this is overkill, reach for Cloudflare or ImprovMX instead.

You can use plain, free Gmail to send as your custom address, with no extra service. Gmail's "Send mail as" feature lets you add [email protected] and send from it through an SMTP server, while a forwarder (like the ones above) brings the incoming mail in.

Pair free Gmail with Cloudflare or ImprovMX forwarding and you can both receive and reply as your domain, for nothing, with a little setup. If you want it all native, fully hosted mail on your domain inside Gmail's interface, that is Google Workspace, from $7 a user a month.

The honest catch: The free route is a two-part setup, a forwarder coming in and Gmail "send as" going out, and the send-as can occasionally land in spam if your SPF is not set. Workspace removes the fiddle but is a per-user subscription.

Mailgun turns up on every email-forwarding list, but be clear what it is: a transactional email API for developers. Its inbound "routes" can forward or POST incoming mail to your app, which is powerful, but it is not a five-minute consumer forwarder.

If you are a developer who wants to receive mail programmatically, parse it, trigger a webhook, route it by rules, then Mailgun (and rivals like Postmark or SendGrid) is the right tool. For simply pointing your domain's email at your Gmail, it is the wrong and pricier one, with paid plans from around $15 a month (Basic) and the commonly-used Foundation tier at $35.

The honest catch: Overkill and overpriced for personal forwarding. Use it only if you are building email handling into software; otherwise pick a real forwarder above.