Losing the inbound routes functionality completes wrecks my use-case for mailgun. I've been using it as a way to have business emails come through a custom domain and then routed to personal email addresses. It actually works well enough as with personal email you can respond "as" the custom domain. I have a tiny startup with a few users that I use the routing to move incoming email to also their own personal addresses. Sure it's simple, but it's far cheaper than getting GSuite. If anyone has any advice for my situation, I could love to hear it.
I have used both ImprovMX and ForwardEmail.net so can comment on them.
ImprovMX has always worked great. I have used it for a handful of email addresses that all forward to my personal account. If your personal account is gmail it's also very easy to set up a "send as." I will definitely use this first next time I need something like this.
ForwardEmail is indeed open source and works pretty good. It's a little more setup than ImprovMX and I did have an issue where sometimes mail would bounce back to the sender and they would tell me about it. I don't know whose fault it was tho, because it was only one sender and her SMTP server was strict. I did also have an issue where all the mail was going into the spam folder of my personal email, but I'm pretty sure it was my fault. I clicked "spam" for a spam message and then gmail started assuming everything from forwardemail.net must be spam so silently "helped" me by hiding everything D-: Once I figured it out I was able to fix it by marking the emails as "not spam" but it occasionally would spam something I needed. So, if you use either of these services, never mark the message as spam. Also if you use forwardemail throw the dev a few bucks (https://forwardemail.net/en/donate) .
Here's the code: https://github.com/forwardemail/free-email-forwarding
Thank you for your post. I run ImprovMX and it's with pleasure that you liked using it :)
We are on the verge to release a sending feature and the decision from Mailgun to drop this came at a great surprise for us.
I always thought of Mailgun like the "unreachable competitor", kind of like "reach for the moon" type of target. But since they moved their forwarding feature to a costly paid plan, it's just like the moon vanished from our trajectory.
Anyway, I'm open to answer any questions if you have any. I also posted about ImprovMX here on HN today (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22223783) and ready to answer all the questions there too.
I'm building a security case management tool [1] where users can generate inbound addresses in the UI, and then I create a case for any emails sent to a generated inbound address. I'm using the two tools above for this.
ZOHO is the only one I can find that still offers a free tier with a custom domain. Their lite $1/month/user account might be an ok fit for you.
It's crazy how the norm has become $5/user/month for something that every web-host on the planet used to charge $.10/user/month for. "But it includes file storage". Yeah, because cable TV tiers is what I always hoped for in tech. /s
You can use you own server with eg. Postfix and Dovecot to do this, either with you own client or use Gmail to read and send the mail. The downside with using just Gmail is that mail will be delayed as Gmail doesn't check inboxes that often. Mail sent from can be stripped for any Gmail headers when being sent out, if you want.
I've used Gmail like this for maybe seven years to avoid gsuite and still have custom domains when using Gmail. The delay seems to vary based on how often there is new mail.
You could use a webmail solution or K9 mail to get mail instantly.
