Zero Clover

Why do you need an email forwarding service?

There are many benefits to using an email forwarding service, such as:

• You can use a separate email address for each website. If a website sells your personal information or if your data is leaked, it will be more difficult to associate you with your other online accounts.
• It helps reduce SPAM. If your online account information is sold to other companies, you will be able to easily identify who sold your information.
• It makes it easier to manage multiple online accounts. If you need to share online accounts with others for work or personal reasons, and if all users need to receive information such as verification codes simultaneously, using an email forwarding service will make it easier to do so.
• Forwarding emails to multiple email addresses that you control reduces the risk of data loss.

How is it different from a domain email?

Ready-made domain email services are generally paid or have lower restrictions on features, storage capacity, and the number of email accounts in their free versions. Personal email services often have larger storage space. Using a paid email forwarding service is often cheaper compared to purchasing a domain email service.

What kind of email forwarding service should you choose?

With the addition of vendors like iCloud and Cloudflare, there are now many similar services available on the market, but each has its own drawbacks. Since this website mainly targets individual users, we will not introduce any ESPs (Email Service Providers, such as Mailgun) or expensive products.

Cloudflare#

Pros#

• Provides a free plan
• Easy to set up
• Supports forwarding emails to multiple recipients
• Can use Cloudflare Worker to fully customize email routing, such as writing your own anti-spam rules
• WebGUI provides two-factor authentication based on WebAuthn

Cons#

• Cannot send emails through aliases
• Requires adding the domain to Cloudflare, which means you must use Cloudflare as the DNS provider if you don't have CNAME Setup
• Does not provide built-in forwarding domains, you need to purchase a domain separately

Forward Email#

Pros#

• Provides a free plan
• Open-source software, can switch to a self-hosted service that is identical to the official service even if it stops operating
• Supports forwarding emails to multiple recipients
• Provides regular expressions, Webhooks, and other methods to filter and manage your email forwarding

Cons#

• Can only send emails through Gmail's "Send Email As" feature and must be added separately for each alias address
• The free plan uses DNS records to store email forwarding settings, which means anyone familiar with this service can easily access your forwarding settings
• Does not provide built-in forwarding domains, you need to purchase a domain separately

Firefox Relay#

Pros#

• Provides a free plan
• Provides built-in domains

Cons#

• The free plan only includes 5 aliases
• Does not support using your own domain
• Firefox Relay's built-in domains are already blacklisted by many services
• Cannot send emails through alias addresses
• Can only forward emails to Mozilla account addresses

iCloud Hide My Email / Custom Email Domain#

Pros#

• Deep integration with Safari in iOS/macOS, making it easier to use for iOS/macOS users
• Can directly reply to emails as an alias
• Provides built-in domains, and iCloud.com is unlikely to be blacklisted by mainstream websites
• Provides two-factor authentication based on WebAuthn

Cons#

• Only offers paid plans
• Only Custom Email Domain can send and reply to emails as an alias, but essentially, it is a domain email
• Can only forward emails to Apple ID email addresses

Finally, let's introduce our protagonist today -

SimpleLogin#

Pros#

• Provides a free plan
• Open-source software, can switch to a self-hosted service that is identical to the official service (including WebGUI)
• Provides multiple built-in domains, paid plans include more built-in domains
• Supports creating subdomains for built-in domains
• Supports creating aliases for built-in domains in a directory format
• Can send and reply to emails as an alias
• Can control the alias's on/off switch or block a specific address from sending emails to the alias through WebGUI/API
• Supports forwarding emails to multiple recipients
• WebGUI provides two-factor authentication based on WebAuthn
• Supports email clients that provide the "one-click unsubscribe" feature
• Supports encrypting all emails forwarded through SimpleLogin using PGP

Cons#

• Sending emails as an alias requires manually creating a "reverse alias," replying to emails does not require it

Why is this better?

You may have noticed that we consider the ability to send/reply to emails as an alias to be an important criterion.

This is because the support services of many websites are likely provided by email systems, and for security or other reasons, a significant number of websites require you to submit and reply to support tickets using the email address associated with your account. If you use an email forwarding service that cannot send emails, it will cause a lot of trouble, such as having to change the email address of your online account (what if you can't log in to your account?) or using a domain email service to send emails (then why didn't I use a domain email from the beginning?).

SimpleLogin not only allows you to directly reply to emails you receive as an alias but also allows you to send emails to any email address as an alias through the "reverse alias" method, without being restricted by specific email service providers. In addition, SimpleLogin has a whitelist feature, so only emails sent from addresses on the whitelist will be forwarded by the reverse alias system, avoiding others acting as your alias.

Furthermore, the ability to forward emails to multiple email addresses helps avoid single points of failure and increases flexibility in receiving emails.

Providing a free plan and built-in domains helps more people try email forwarding services to help them decide if they really need such a service without incurring any additional costs. At the same time, using non-private domains in certain situations helps reduce your footprint, in which case iCloud wins.

Most importantly, SimpleLogin is open-source software, and you can use the source code hosted on GitHub to set up a self-hosted service that is identical to the official service. SimpleLogin is also not associated with your important online accounts, so you don't have to worry about losing access to your important online accounts due to reasons like "you violated our terms of service, but we can't tell you exactly what."