About Forward Email

About Forward Email

Overview

Forward Email is a free and open-source email forwarding service focused on a user's right to privacy. What began as a simple email forwarding solution in 2017 has evolved into a comprehensive email platform offering unlimited custom domain names, unlimited email addresses and aliases, unlimited disposable email addresses, spam and phishing protection, encrypted mailbox storage, and numerous advanced features.

The service is maintained and owned by its original founding team of designers and developers. It is built with 100% open-source software using JavaScript, Node.js, DNS, HTTPS, TLS, and SMTP.

Founder and Mission

Forward Email was founded by Nicholas Baugh in 2017. According to the Forward Email Technical Whitepaper, Baugh was initially searching for a cost-effective and simple solution for enabling email on domain names for his side-projects. After researching available options, he began coding his own solution and purchased the domain forwardemail.net on October 2, 2017.

Forward Email's mission extends beyond providing email services—it aims to transform how the industry approaches email privacy and security. The company's core values include transparency, user control, and privacy protection through technical implementation rather than just policy promises.

Timeline

2017 - Founding and Launch

October 2, 2017: Nicholas Baugh purchased the domain forwardemail.net after researching cost-effective email solutions for his side-projects.

November 5, 2017: Baugh created a 634-line JavaScript file using Node.js to forward emails for any custom domain name. This initial implementation was published as open-source to GitHub and the service was launched using GitHub Pages.

November 2017: Forward Email officially launched after an initial release. The early version was purely DNS-based with no account registration or sign-up process—simply a README file written in Markdown with instructions. Users could set up email forwarding by configuring MX records to point to mx1.forwardemail.net and mx2.forwardemail.net, and adding a TXT record with [email protected].

The simplicity and effectiveness of this solution attracted attention from prominent developers, including David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Ruby on Rails), who continues to use Forward Email on his domain dhh.dk to this day.

2018 - Infrastructure and Integration

April 2018: When Cloudflare launched their privacy-first consumer DNS service, Forward Email switched from using OpenDNS to Cloudflare for handling DNS lookups, demonstrating the company's commitment to privacy-focused infrastructure choices.

October 2018: Forward Email allowed users to "Send Mail As" with Gmail and Outlook, expanding integration capabilities with popular email providers.

2019 - Performance Revolution

May 2019: Forward Email released v2, which represented a major rewrite from the initial versions. This update focused on performance improvements through the use of Node.js's streams, establishing the foundation for the platform's scalability.

2020 - Privacy and Security Focus

February 2020: Forward Email released the Enhanced Privacy Protection plan, allowing users to switch off setting public DNS record entries with their email forwarding configuration aliases. Through this plan, a user's email alias information is hidden from being publicly searchable over the Internet. The company also released a feature to enable or disable specific aliases while still allowing them to appear as valid email addresses and return successful SMTP status codes, with emails being immediately discarded (similar to piping output to /dev/null).

April 2020: After hitting countless roadblocks with existing spam-detection solutions that didn't honor Forward Email's privacy policy, the company released their initial alpha version of Spam Scanner. This completely free and open-source anti-spam filtering solution uses a Naive Bayes spam filter approach combined with anti-phishing and IDN homograph attack protection. Forward Email also released two-factor authentication (2FA) using one-time passwords (OTP) for enhanced account security.

May 2020: Forward Email allowed custom port forwarding as a workaround for users to circumvent port blocking by their ISP. The company also released their Free Email Forwarding RESTful API with complete documentation and real-time request and response examples, along with support for webhooks.

August 2020: Forward Email added support for the Authenticated Received Chain ("ARC") email authentication system, further strengthening email security and deliverability.

November 23, 2020: Forward Email publicly launched out of their beta program, marking a significant milestone in the platform's development.

2021 - Platform Modernization

February 2021: Forward Email refactored their codebase to remove all Python dependencies, allowing their stack to become 100% JavaScript and Node.js. This architectural decision aligned with the company's commitment to maintaining a consistent, open-source technology stack.

September 27, 2021: Forward Email added support for email forwarding aliases to match regular expressions, providing users with more sophisticated email routing capabilities.

2023 - Infrastructure and Feature Expansion

January 2023: Forward Email launched a re-designed and page-speed optimized website, improving user experience and performance.

February 2023: The company added support for error logs and implemented a dark mode website color scheme, responding to user preferences and accessibility needs.

March 2023: Forward Email released Tangerine and integrated it throughout their infrastructure, enabling the use of DNS over HTTPS ("DoH") at the application layer. The company also added support for MTA-STS and switched from hCaptcha to Cloudflare Turnstile.

April 2023: Forward Email implemented and automated entirely new infrastructure. The entire service began running on globally load-balanced and proximity-based DNS with health checks and failover using Cloudflare, replacing the previous round-robin DNS approach. The company switched to bare metal servers across multiple providers, including Vultr and Digital Ocean, both SOC 2 Type 1 compliant providers. MongoDB and Redis databases were moved to clustered configurations with primary and standby nodes for high availability, end-to-end SSL encryption, encryption-at-rest, and point-in-time recovery (PITR).

May 2023: Forward Email launched their outbound SMTP feature for sending email with SMTP and sending email with API requests. This feature includes built-in safeguards to ensure high deliverability, a modern and robust queue and retry system, and supports error logs in real-time.

November 2023: Forward Email launched their encrypted mailbox storage feature for IMAP support, representing a significant advancement in email privacy and security.

December 2023: The company added support for POP3, passkeys and WebAuthn, time to inbox monitoring, and OpenPGP for IMAP Storage.

2024 - Service Optimization and Advanced Features

February 2024: Forward Email added calendar (CalDAV) support, expanding the platform's capabilities beyond email to include calendar synchronization.

March to July 2024: Forward Email released major optimizations and improvements to their IMAP, POP3, and CalDAV services, with the goal of making their service as fast as, if not faster than, alternatives.

July 2024: The company added iOS Push support to address Apple Mail on iOS's lack of IMAP IDLE command support, enabling real-time notifications for Apple iOS devices. Forward Email also added time to inbox ("TTI") monitoring for their own service and Yahoo/AOL, and began allowing users to encrypt their entire DNS TXT record even on the free plan. As requested in Privacy Guides discussions and GitHub issues, the company added the ability for aliases to either quietly reject 250, soft reject 421, or hard reject 550 when disabled.

August 2024: Forward Email added support for exporting mailboxes as EML and Mbox formats (in addition to the existing SQLite export format). Webhook signature support was added, and the company began allowing users to send newsletters, announcements, and email marketing through their outbound SMTP service. Domain-wide and alias-specific storage quotas for IMAP/POP3/CalDAV were also implemented.

2025 - Continued Innovation

September 2024 to January 2025: Forward Email added a highly-requested vacation responder feature and OpenPGP/WKD encryption for email forwarding, building upon their already implemented encrypted mailbox storage capabilities.

January 21, 2025: The founder's best friend "Jack", his loyal canine companion, peacefully passed away at the age of nearly 11. Jack will always be remembered for his unwavering companionship that supported the creation of Forward Email. The Forward Email Technical Whitepaper is dedicated to Jack, acknowledging his role in the service's development.

February 2025: Forward Email switched to DataPacket as their new primary data center provider, implementing custom, performance-focused, bare-metal hardware to further enhance service reliability and speed.

Core Principles

Since its inception, Forward Email has maintained a steadfast commitment to privacy and security principles:

100% Open-Source Philosophy: Unlike competitors who only open-source their frontends while keeping backends closed, Forward Email has made its entire codebase—both frontend and backend—available for public scrutiny on GitHub.

Privacy-First Design: From day one, Forward Email implemented a unique in-memory processing approach that avoids writing emails to disk, setting it apart from conventional email services that store messages in databases or file systems.

Continuous Innovation: The service has evolved from a simple email forwarding solution to a comprehensive email platform with features like encrypted mailboxes, quantum-resistant encryption, and support for standard protocols including SMTP, IMAP, POP3, and CalDAV.

Transparency: Making all code open-source and available for inspection, ensuring users can verify privacy claims rather than simply trusting marketing statements.

User Control: Empowering users with options, including the ability to self-host the entire platform if desired.

Current Status

As of 2025, Forward Email serves over 500,000 domains worldwide, including notable organizations and industry leaders such as:

• Technology Companies: Canonical (Ubuntu), Netflix Games, The Linux Foundation, The PHP Foundation, jQuery, LineageOS
• Media Organizations: Fox News Radio, Disney Ad Sales
• Educational Institutions: The University of Cambridge, The University of Maryland, The University of Washington, Tufts University, Swarthmore College
• Government Entities: Government of South Australia, Government of Dominican Republic
• Other Organizations: RCD Hotels, Fly.io
• Notable Developers: Isaac Z. Schlueter (npm creator), David Heinemeier Hansson (Ruby on Rails creator)

The platform continues to evolve with regular feature releases and infrastructure improvements, maintaining its position as the only 100% open-source, encrypted, privacy-focused, transparent, and quantum-resistant email service available today.