Forwarding Compared: ImprovMX, Cloudflare

If you already forward mail with another service, this page explains what is different here, in plain terms. All figures come from each provider's own published limits at the time of writing; check theirs before making a decision on numbers alone.

At a glance

What each one is for

Cloudflare Email Routing is free and does one job well: if your DNS already lives at Cloudflare, forwarding is a few clicks away. The catch is that it is receive-only and tied to their DNS. You cannot have a real mailbox on the same domain, every destination address has to be confirmed by clicking a link in an email, and there is a ceiling of 200 destination addresses shared across your whole account — which an agency with many client inboxes can reach sooner than expected.

ImprovMX is a dedicated forwarding service, and a good one. You pay for forwarding and get forwarding. DNS records are yours to enter by hand, there is no way to import an existing setup from elsewhere, and mailboxes are a separate product.

TrekMail treats forwarding as one setting on a domain that can also hold real mailboxes. That is the practical difference: a client who starts with a single forwarded address and later wants a proper inbox does not move to another provider — you switch it on for that domain.

Moving your setup over

This is where most of the work usually goes, so we made it the short part.

Open a domain, go to Routing → Forwarding addresses → Import, and pick Cloudflare, ImprovMX, or a CSV file. We read your existing rules, show you exactly what will be created and what will be skipped and why, and create only the domains you tick.

Nothing at the old provider is changed or deleted. Your current forwarding keeps running until you point your MX records at us, so you can prepare the move days before you make it, and roll back by simply not switching.

Two limits worth knowing before you start: catch-all rules and wildcard addresses do not come across as individual addresses, because they are a domain-wide setting here — you set those under Catch-all inbox. And a domain has to be added to your account before its addresses can be imported; the preview tells you which ones are missing.

What you get here that forwarding-only services do not

• Mailboxes on the same domain. Forward press@, give the founder a real inbox at name@, on one domain, in one place.
• One-click DNS. On supported providers we write the records for you instead of handing you a list to copy.
• Pause instead of delete. Stop an address for a while and keep its recipients.
• A preview before anything changes. Both on import and when you save.
• API and AI agents. Listing, creating, changing and removing addresses all work over the API and through MCP tools, so setting up a new client domain can be one scripted step — and an agent can read the delivery history to check the mail is arriving, not just that a rule exists. Only the import wizard stays in the dashboard.
• Per-address delivery history. For each address you can see what arrived, where it went, and what the receiving server said — including mail our filters blocked as spam before forwarding it.

What we do not do

Being straight about this saves everyone time.

• Forwarding does not send. A forwarding address receives and passes on. Replies come from whatever inbox the recipient uses. If you need to answer as the address, create a mailbox.
• Forwarding is on the Agency plan. Other plans can set rules up and save them, but they start delivering only after the upgrade. Cloudflare's forwarding is free; if free forwarding is all you need, they are the honest recommendation.
• We do not import catch-all or wildcard rules as addresses, as described above.
• Delivery history is kept for days, not months. Each address has a per-message log — when mail arrived, who from, where it went and what the receiving server said, including anything spam filtering stopped before forwarding. It covers the last 30 days on Agency; older entries are removed.

Which to choose

If you want free forwarding, your DNS is at Cloudflare, and you will never need a mailbox on that domain — use Cloudflare.

If you forward for many domains, want a preview before changes, want to move an existing setup over in minutes, or expect some of those domains to grow into real mailboxes — that is what this is built for. See Forwarding Addresses to set one up.